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Open US GPS Data?
tobiasly writes "I read an article today about a map error on the popular Garmin GPS devices which often leads to truckers in a particular town becoming trapped. From my own experience, every electronic map I've ever seen (Google, Mapquest, my Mio GPS) has the layout of my neighborhood completely and frustratingly wrong. A quick search turned up only one open-source mapping project, but it's for New Zealand only. Why are there no comparable projects in the U.S. or elsewhere? Obviously such a project would need a good peer-review/moderation/trust system but I'd gladly put in the time necessary to drive around town with my GPS in "tracking" mode, then upload, tag, and verify my local data. Has anyone with more technical knowledge in maps and auto-routing looked more into this? Are there technical limitations to such a project? Should the government subsidize a project to create open, free, up-to-date electronic maps? Surely there is a public benefit available from such a project."
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
It can definitely be frustrating. There's a street near my house where I grew up that is complete on every online map I've ever seen, but the truth is it's actually two dead ends that don't meet up. I've seen other mistakes as well. Unfortunately the same bad data keeps getting recycled everywhere, because companies are too lazy to verify things. I'm all for an open source mapping project, or at the very least better ways of reporting errors.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Get your own free personal location tracker
For Argentina, there is www.proyectomapear.com.ar
The only two suppliers of nav map data in North America are Navteq and TeleAtlas. They have both invested huge amounts of money in creating their maps, including driving around cities doing street-by-street mapping with vans, although most of their data came originally from official public street maps. Both companies have been the target of multi-billion dollar take over offers in the last year. In addition to capturing the map data, tagging (street names, one-way, turn restrictions, road type etc.) and validation (making sure streets link up correctly in the database) are also huge jobs. I wouldn't want to say that an open-source effort is not possible, but we shouldn't underestimate the magnitude of the job. It involves a lot more effort than just driving around a few streets in your neighborhood.
Open Street Map has a good and growing base of data for the US. Plus they link in to open source or freeware applications that you can load on PDAs, GPS-enabled cell phones, laptops, etc to begin creating traces that can then be turned into map data.
Combine that with Open Source GIS software to query the data source and you're in business.
For this to work, you have to have a huge pool of people willing to drive a lot. Even the big map players (NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas) have problems keeping data up to speed, and they have an army of people driving around double-checking existing street grids.
***Foucault is watching you..***
Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with an "open source project". It is more like:
1. Make something that is so-so.
2. Profit!
3. Let the people who pay a lot of money for this so-so product do work for You without paying them for it. These users will take Your product from the so-so stadium and turn it into a good product.
4. Even more Profit! without any costs.
Reminds me a bit of cddb... What the OP wants is something like Freedb.
I had an experience recently where I was driving through an unfamiliar town the next state over, following my Garmin. It took me on a route that, while leading eventually to the right place, did not seem to make much sense given the other roads available. I noticed a camper in the lane next to me that didn't seem to belong, and that driver also had a GPS navigator mounted on his windshield. So I found myself wondering: does he have the same unit (or data source) as me? If I did a study of all the non-local cars driving down this road, how many of them would have the same unit in their cars?
There are several interesting implications, the most obvious being "sponsored routing" down a particular street in a business dist.....gotta go, I'm on the phone with my patent attorney.
Evil is the money of root.
The government already creates these maps (TIGER), which are in the public domain. But I'll admit, it's a little fun to pretend that Google/MapQuest/Yahoo and whoever else are driving around all of the Western world with GPSs attached to their cars :)
~whm
In Australia there is the Tracks4Australia project which uses user contributed GPS track logs to generate rural and remote area trail and road maps, mostly useful for 4WDers etc. They are working on a commercial product now but the basic mapset appears to be staying free.
If you use one of the Nokia internet tablets, try Maemo Mapper.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/
Format is a bit obscure, but it works rather ok. We were able to use the data to draw road maps and then find paths on them. I'm sure it has it's own problems too but maybe you could contact them and point out the errors.
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
You think adding the Government would help improve mapping products? I'll keep my tax dollars, thanks.
I would point out that Government funding is the reason that you are able to A) connect to thousands of computers/websites across the globe right now, and B) the reason that you even have a "computer" sitting on your desk. Ironically, this funding is also the reason that satillites in space can provide us with overhead images that you see in Google Maps and the like as well.
The funniest thing about the Garmin is that is will tell you to make illegal U-Turns.
The story goes like this: My girlfriend got one for Christmas and we where going to test it by going to get grandmothers house. Halfway there my girlfriend went on autopilot, so to speak, because she's done this trip so many times. All the sudden we hear "Make a U-Turn... Recalculating" What the hell? Then we hear it again... The Garmin was telling us to perform illegal U-turns to work on its gps calculations.
I wonder if that would hold up "But officer. The GPS told me to!"
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
My TomTom device has mapshare built in, I'd be astonished if Garmin did not. I've made dozens of map corrections (mostly silly stuff like incorrect street names) and they seem to update the maps often. My neighbourhood has been around for a while so no problems with the street layout here. I believe TomTom use Teradata maps whereas most other GPS systems use a different company.
I would love to see an open mapping project though.
I've reported errors to several map makers, including Google maps and the makers of the maps in our phone directory. They all have ways to report errors. If each one of grabs a map right now and reports just one error, just think how much better the maps will be next year...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You can blame the government mainly your local streets dept for this. I've noticed state and federal highways being much more accurate than local or rural streets. May your deity help you if you live in a town that likes to rename side streets every few months.
Sure, it would be nice if there was some federal D.O.T. streets db for the entire country that your local streets department could upload all their changes into and all the GPS map folks would just that. I doubt it'll ever be that clean cut or that your local street department will want to even give any other city much less state or federal government department access to updated street info. This is just my personal experience working in a city police department and occasionally trying to get this information from the city entities that physically make and should be tracking these things.
The more that I see that its difficult or impossible for intercity departments to communicate I tend to think that the only real solution is for Pizza companies or UPS/FedEx to partner with Google streets to actually physically map out where their fleets move through.
If your city has a GIS department, then that should be keeping track of this information.... You could always do a FOIA request for any arcview street centerline data.
The problem is that most of us have problems getting that "updated" arcview street centerline data into our lowest price GPS device.
We have been collecting GPS positions at 10 second intervals since we began operations in London in 2004 (we're a courier company with a technology twist). We have collected 173 million positions on a 24/7 basis (growing by about 1 million per day) across our bicycle, motorbike, and van fleet. We have been donating to OpenStreetMap for years and have released our data for noncommercial use via a public API http://api.ecourier.co.uk/ under a CC license. Have fun!
Please forgive the slightly off-topic post...
Two of the biggest map data providers are Navteq and TeleAtlas. Each company has a section on their website where you can report errors in their maps.
Since they will need to review your submission and mapping sites like Google Maps and Mapquest only update their map data a couple times a year, it will be a while before your correction goes public (if ever).
-- Halfabee
I am amongst the ones who believe we're only seeing the beginning of OSM everywhere. Contrary to your comment, I believe it is happening and will not take that long to reach some level of overall maturity. As to why is doesn't need an army of volunteers? Because, as done with the TIGER dataset, datasets are directly piped into OSM, as done in the Netherlands last year.
Animoog.org
No, no, not so-so, TomTom!
Come and live in New Zealand, eh?
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
If you wait for a manufacturer to make all the corrections, you will wait forever because they can't check all places at all times and certainly wouldn't know all the best PoI and restaurants even if they're full time residents. For instance, both TomTom and Garmin GPS list a TGI Fridays that was a few blocks from my home as still in business when, in fact, it moved 2 miles away over 6 months ago and is being replaced by a new restaurant. There is also a fantastic Thai restaurant (it has won awards for best Thai) tucked behind a strip mall that isn't listed and I'd love to add it.
Personally, I like features like this on TomTom, but yes, an open source database would rock. Even something that pulled from google maps would be cool, IMO, as long as google maps stays free.
This is a great idea. We could have some federal government institution which deals with lots of maps anyway take the initiative and create digitized map data for the whole country, using information from USGS quads. For "fact checking", they could mail out the map data to every municipality in the country, who would make corrections which would be incorporated into the system. The data would be publicly available from the government for free, to be used by open-source or commercial makers of maps and map tools.
Congrats! You've just re-invented TIGER, run by the U.S. Census Bureau. If you use map software, it probably uses TIGER data. If the data in your town is inaccurate, it's because your local government sucks.
Folks, be aware that one way that a mapmaker "improves" on a copyright protection is to intentionally alter a small section of a map (and in a book, a few at random) that is hopefully not used. This helps them to prosecute somebody that steals the map information and resells it. Granted, this is known for hard-copy maps, but I believe it is also true for GPS maps as well (call them the "soft-copy" versions).
I can attest to this because near where my parents live on most maps there is a road that appears to go from their development right into the next one. Unfortunately, there is a gap of about 100 feet where there is no road but rather a swampy stream. And it gets better... When they were laying sewer lines, they put in in this swampy stream so that if somebody wants to extend the road they will have to build a bridge over the stream. So this would involve (and has involved) the state, county, and sewer authority determining how much each should pay.
You can guess how far this has gotten...I'm expecting it may happen when my (as yet unborn) great grandchildren reach 21 years of age...
Of course, this was the source of a lot of fun during the summer when growing up...my brother and I would sit out on the front lawn in the twilight/evening/night and watch the cars come zooming down to take the "short-cut" and then have to slam on their brakes and then back up and wander around aimlessly. Nobody ever crashed into the swamp, but one person almost hit the barrier at the end of the street.
Yes, I did call the map people (ADC) and report it several times over a decade. It's still that way in the latest edition, and I've seen the same mistake in an in-dash GPS display for the location in one car.
Guess it's now "Driver Beware"...
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
I'm amused at the thought of trying to create an open-source version of a typical North American commercial GPS street/address database and navigation program. I've used a GPS system in my car for about 3 years now, and while I encounter the occasional error or omission, most of the time I marvel that it works at all, much less as well as it does. As someone who has worked on some very large scale software projects, I have to say that the software quality assurance (SQA) challenges and issues for both the database itself and generating navigation routes from Point A to Point B are enough to give me the heebie jeebies -- particularly given the IT industry's general track record on SQA practices.
..bruce..
Here's a reality check. Pick any one-square-mile area of your community and attempt to create (and keep up to date) a GPS navigation system that will legally, safely, and efficiently navigate you between any two addresses within that square mile, keeping in mind your civil liabilities should your system cause accidents, injuries, or illegal driving maneuvers. Oh, and your navigation system has to fit in a device that's about the same size as a Palm Pilot or an iPod touch and that runs on rechargeable batteries.
Now scale this up by about 3.5 million to cover the United States.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
I worked as a surveyor for a private engineering firm a few years back and it isn't a simple task just to collect data and upload it. This applies for GPS data as well that you have to upload into GIS, or the like, software and manipulate it with any data-correction and overlays to aerial or satellite photography. Trust me, I spent hours cleaning up collection points and trying to get it to match up with the overlays with GPS data for invasive species management plans for a national park I worked at using ArcGIS (which is absolutely terrible to work with in comparison to ArcView). The surveying part usually requires some sort of CAD to properly map out what information you have collected during surveying and in-the-field math to figure out what goes where. It's not as simple as you think it might be.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
In France I was lead down a country lane that got narrower and narrower and eventually I came to the conclusion that I would not get my standard car through, so I turned round. Now My wife has a terrible sense of direction - or to be fair she is American and navigates by intersections, junctions and so on rather than by landmarks like you have to with the squiggly roads in Europe. (Actually I am as bad in the USA, all the roads and junctions look the same to me and by the time I read an exit sign's road number I have passed it) As I headed back the way I came my GPS was still locked on to the old route and said "make a U-turn when its safe to do so". It did this a couple of times at about 5 minute intervals when my wife said "you could have turned in the gateway there". I pointed out that it wanted to send us back the way we came, and that we had given up on that route. My wife said "I don't know why you brought that thing if you don't even listen to it". This got my teenage daughter and I laughing. Big mistake. Most women dislike being laughed at by husbands and by teenage daughters. Both laughing together is even less popular. My wife is a Texan, and Texan women don't usually keep it to themselves when they are unhappy.... End result, my GPS is at maximum throwing distance in some field in France.
1. I use TigerData as a GIS professional and frankly its often crap. It was a good start for a rushed product in order to launch a project, but I would not now nor would I ever rely on its accuracy without checking it. The TigerData for my area regularly has roads going off the sides of mountains, roads where there have never been roads, etc. Also, the TigerData for my area has not been updated since it was released almost 8 years ago.
2. As for "driving around" it would depend upon how accurate the device is. The local utility company I work closely with spent 5,000$ just on the handheld to receive subcentimeter readings and about 20,000$ on the base station to accompany it. Your typical yellow DeLorme unit is great for driving around but it is not a data collection unit I would use when building maps. Depending upon satellite coverage for your area (weather, tree cover, geography, the placement of the 3 satellites needed to position accurately) your store bought unit could be as much as 100ft or more off your actual location and rarely closer than 5ft. Again depending upon coverage and the device. Then add the need for regular updates and mapping changes.
3. An open source mapping project would be great, but it is currently rather expensive to actually collect and process the data needed to build accurate maps. A terrific source of addressing and centerline information is your local E911 Board. At least in my part of the world they do much of the fire district, centerline, and, of course, addressing for mapping.
Mayor Dennis Elwell says residents on Fifth Street started complaining about trucks clogging their street about a year ago as GPS devices increased in popularity. Some drivers have to call police to open the gate because their trucks are too big to turn around. It looks like they made a gate to shield some gentrified neighborhood from the contact with lower classes, and ended up with a street full of trucks. Solution: open the fucking gate, you stupid yuppies!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Try searching Google maps for "Dummy1456".
Map data will make or break a GPS product. To me, you are committing monetary suicide if you buy a GPS where you cannot regularly update the maps, and/or the manufacturer does not provide such updates.
Most consumer-level GPSes do not have updateable maps, and those that do just update you with a year-old map they got for cheap.
I have a Garmin GPSMAP-496 and I *love* it.
If you want a good GPS with an accurate map, you have to pay for it. The $100 Mio piece-o-shit GPS is going to have, at best, a 3-5 year old map on it that they picked up a license for on the cheap. I tried a Mio, and it didn't even have a new map for the intersection of North Wales and Morris roads in 19446, which had been redesigned a decade or more ago. The result: "Turn right down this road that doesn't exist anymore."
There were also many cases where it would tell me to drive a mile or more out of my way, only to turn around and go back. It also sent me down dead-end streets SEVERAL times because it thought they still went through. Again, these changes around town were made a decade or more ago, but the Mio had no idea because the manufacturer used really old map data.
Of course your map is wrong; you don't live on an Interstate. A few points to make on the digital mapping companies responsible for all the maps, update cycles and TIGER. And some bias, I was a former employee of one of the digital mapping companies. In the US (And globally) There are two companies that are responsible for all the digital maps Tele Atlas (Owned by TomTom) and Navteq (Owned by Nokia). If you look at any GPS device or online map site you will see a copyright from one or both companies. Their business is driven by getting people from point A to Point B the fastest i.e. by routing you to nearest highway and having you drive on it for the longest amount of time possible. The main focus is the US highway system: Interstates, US Highways, State Highways, Regional, County and Municipal Routes and the major metropolitan areas. If you don't live in the metro areas there is very little business need for correcting the errors in your locality. Why fix the streets in Stowe, VT (pop 6,000) when many more people will be served if the streets and addresses were updated in Cary, NC (pop 130,000 metro area of Raleigh, NC)? Each company works on a quarterly update cycle where a new version of their mapping database is available for purchase every 90 days or so. Some customers get the quarterly updates some get annual updates. The GPS units and online mapping sites are only as good as the currency of their maps. Make sure you update you maps every time an update comes out. There is always construction and changes in the road system and old maps will not reflect the newer changes. Just because Google Maps says the copyright is 2008 doesn't mean the map has been updated recently. I know when I was working for the mapping company we were working on a huge project for a car company that would be taking the mapping database produced in Fall 06 and using it for the navigation systems in their 2008 cars. If you do have a specific problem go right to the source to get it fixed Navteq map reporter or Tele Atlas Map Insight. The US Gov't does have a free nationwide map you can use TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) Produced by the Census Bureau. When was the last Census done? 8 years ago? Yea that gives you an idea of how accurate the TIGER map is. TIGER was made for government applications showing very accurate municipal boundaries and topology of streets. To get an open source Map project going you will need a good sized server, Volunteers in just about every municipality, good database software that can hold every thing you ever wanted to know about streets (name, address, one way, truck and vehicle restrictions, routing info, Points of Interest, zip code, real time traffic data, gated communities, municipal boundaries, state locality, ect...) a great set of possionally accurate aerially imagery (preferable 10m acct or less) for alignment of streets, and did I mention a large army of helpers in every municipality. Just make sure you get the newest maps updates for your navigation device and go directly to the source for map fixes: Navteq map reporter or Tele Atlas Map Insight.
OSM already has those features - they're called tags (not layers)
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Map_Features
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
I made GIS maps for years, always using public data. And there is a lot out there, and it is government subsidized, and it can be of marginal quality. The only nationwide project I am aware of is the TIGER project, which is supposed to release a new, provisional data set every year. When you can get it to work, its pretty good. Federal agencies also often release their own datasets, and we would often have forest service, national park service, and blm data on the same maps, sometimes in overlapping areas. Then there are the county datasets. And the city where I live put out their own dataset a few years back. So there's plenty of data, and it is almost all free. Companies that charge for it often have done post-processing or packaging which I believe they have government contracts to do and are allowed to recoup their investment.
Where trouble often comes in is in projections, spheroids, datums and the like. GIS data on different scale will use a different model of the globe to pinpoint places, will use different coordinate conventions, often related to the agency that produced the set (eg the city always used something called state plane, the fs always uses the nad27 datum, well, mostly). Two datasets that have location information for the same road can be meters off simple because they are not represented in the same projection correctly either by the software or the person doing the projection. And these are just location issues. Tabular data is a whole other thing.
The poster sounds a little uninformed about GIS in general.
Apparently you don't understand the concept of cuisine so I'll try to enlighten you. There is very little quality difference between a reasonably priced and expensive restaurans. By and large the food is pretty decent but you'll end up with mediocre food in restaurants with a Michelin star just as often as you will end up with stellar food in a more mundane place. The difference, my friend is exclusivity. There is some part in our brain (I believe it's called the Nucleus Superfluous) that makes regular stimuli more enjoyable when you have been waiting for very long. This is exactly why so many people went to see Episode One, while there was very little reason to assume it was going to be good even before it was reviewed.
The same principle holds true for restaurants. The first couple of bucks will go into food quality and better service. There is a very real difference between a $5 hamburger meal and a $15 steak. But the next $50 will go into square plates, french accents and, of course, exclusivity in the form of missed opportunity costs. You pay for the fact that they might have sold the food to the person currently waiting at the bar.
In this light you'll probably understand how downright stupid it is to share that little known Thai restaurant behind the strip mall with the rest of the planet. Before you know it, hordes of TomTom-toting patrons will crowd your once lovely restaurant. Prices will skyrocket, portions will shrink and before you know it it will obtain a Michelin star and you will have to find somewhere else to eat.
Free Map data source? easy. grab the Us census bureau tiger line Census data. That's what most of them out there use to begin with anyways. Last time I checked it was a free download. i was working on a linux GPS navigation app with it for a car pc project. Then I found how to run a windows app for it under wine and my need was filled.
The data is actually easy to parse. far easier than navteq data.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They buy them.
You can buy them too. Very expensive, and most of the US maps are completely shite anyway. If you were to create a good database of routes, streets etc, the PND and phone manufacturers would love you.
The only really updatable maps I've come across are Google maps, and of course Nokia have Ovi on the way, where the whole point is to be able to sync routes/locations with your friends.
Deleted
As a mapping professional I can insert some truth to this Slashdot orgy of mis-information. There is publicly available data for road centerlines in nearly every state, this data tends to be rather accurate, and thus large. For the use of GPS, you need to use generalized and often closed formats, and thus this accurate data won't work. Most GPS companies buy their data from data wholesalers Navtec, Teleatlas...etc. I have an assoc who works for one of these companies, they collect the publicly available data and reform it to their formats, they also dither(generalize) the data down so it'll be smaller in filesize. Often times the data warehouses will take the accurate vector data and convert it to low res raster data. If TomTom or Garmin wanted accurate data they could get it, but they are willing to do the work or take the time. Tiger data is very generalized, but will be revised very soon to increase the accuracy. Again this was a matter of data size, the accurate data was dithered again. Also bear in mind these GPS devices still aren't overly accurate. but there is freely available road centerline data in every state I can think of, in my state it is nearly survey accurate. As for street names, that is a whole additional ballgame, that is very intensive data collection.
As with some of the other posters that have dealt with GIS in one form or another, so do I. I am a GIS analyst for a county government, and I can tell you that when any new roads are cut, we are the ones that start the ball rolling. So, you can see that over time, lots of governmental organizations are the ones that initally put these roads out there (aka make available for distribution). If you take my particular organization, multiply that by every county and local government in the country, you can see the conflation that occurs when your major road navigation companies try to stitch these together. I dont know the exact number, but some states have different projections for their data, and there's at least one for every state. States that have some kind of non-equal extents (california and north carolina come to mind)usually have multiple ones. Assembling this data takes time and effort, even if it's just updating what they already have.
Another problem is that you dont want every tom, dick, and harry editing GIS data for the masses. Control is key, and there is an implication that the data has been quality checked and will lead you to wherever you go. If you have grandpa out there, logging some points and uploading them to the public, how do you know that he put the data through differential correction and the lines are topologically correct?
One final thing...my county doesn't try to profit off of it, but there's many, many governments that charge some pretty high fees for somebody to go in and buy their data. You think that they would give that up easily, when they're basically making total profit off of the data and we have to maintain it as part of our job? No way.
So my advice is this: there are ways to convert and upload basic GIS shapefiles into your GPS units if you so wish. Check with the local authority to get your best data. Our E-911 system uses it, shouldn't you?
Having mapped a couple of square miles for OpenStreetMap, I can attest to the fact that these alterations are incredibly common on Google Maps. There are half a dozen within half a mile of my house, most being added curves or extensions to dead-end roads and added or removed traffic islands. Google also cunningly add fake roads to the map data which correlate with features which look like roads on the satellite imagery but actually aren't - they're private drives, streams, paths rather than roads through woodland etc. The ones near me wouldn't seriously affect navigation, but some I've seen in the past would. Oh yes, Google Maps is also shifted by about 5m from WGS84 (GPS coordinates) round here, I presume this is intentional too.
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