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Google Crowd-Sources Maps

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i'm-adding-moats dept.

Wamoc writes "Google has invited 'citizen cartographers' to refine the US map for Google Maps and Google Earth. 'Today we're opening the map of the United States in Google Map Maker for you to add your expert local knowledge directly. You know your neighborhood or hometown best, and with Google Map Maker you can ensure the places you care about are richly represented on the map. For example, you can fix the name of your local pizza parlor, or add a description of your favorite book store.'"

7 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. This sounds familiar... by Haedrian · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.openstreetmap.org/

    1. Re:This sounds familiar... by Teancum · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sounds like all of the fun that Gracenote did with the CDDB several years ago. A very much for-profit company who collected a ton of information from volunteers and then turned it into a for-profit business that screwed over the volunteers who couldn't even access the database for their own contributions without paying a licensing fee.

      I like Open Street Map, and that was my first thought when I heard that Google was letting volunteer contributions in. Google has in fact been a real pain in the behind to that project and does view it as the "competition".

    2. Re:This sounds familiar... by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Informative

      Depends where you are. For some places in Europe, OSM is vastly more complete than Google, showing post boxes and rubbish bins. I'm about to leave for Tajikistan, and I see that there's very little detail there, but for how many users is that a problem?

    3. Re:This sounds familiar... by richlv · · Score: 3

      very. hopefully people will discover osm and "upgrade" from google - with osm, you can get entire dataset and do nearly anything with it.

      several other mapping companies are contributing to osm - http://open.mapquest.com/, even http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/08/02/bing-maps-adds-open-street-maps-layer.aspx (although the link in the latter seems to be broken right now :) )

      you can find other interesting uses of osm data here : http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM_based_Services

      of course, there's always the fact that "map maker" was available in multiple other countries before "opening" it for usa. which means others have had a chance to ask "why do this if there's osm" already ;) http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Kompa/diary/10047

      so i would like to invite everybody to join http://osm.org/ :)

      --
      Rich
  2. What other info? by Locke2005 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Address and ratings for all the girls that put out? Sure, there is no way this can be abused...

    --
    I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
  3. Has everyone forgotten CDDB? by awilden · · Score: 5, Insightful

    OpenStreetMaps is a classic grass-roots effort. People have sweat blood making OSM work, proving the "business" model, working out the kinks, and donating immeasurable time towards making this a success. Now that somebody has done the dirty work to prove that this method of crowd-sourcing maps can work, Google trots out its sexy service that will grab the buzz, divert the resources, advertise interest away and steal the user cycles towards improving its own closed proprietary maps. Yes, that's correct, proprietary -- there's no guarantee that what you do will remain freely available.

    Has everyone forgotten the CDDB debacle? Quoting wiki: "The original software behind CDDB was released under the GNU General Public License, and many people submitted CD information thinking the service would also remain free." Those of you who remember will recognize what an understatement that is. Needless to say, those users were wrong and one day they found that all their effort was suddenly swallowed up and they were being asked to pay for access to the data they submitted.

    I don't believe Google is evil and I don't work with OSM, but if Google is not evil it has to realize the negative impacts its actions can have on the kinds of grassroots open-source efforts it claims to support. Google is not stepping in to use its resources to do what the crowd cannot -- it will end up undercutting a project where the crowd was doing just fine on its own. And the ordinary Joes need to realize what is going on and channel their efforts to the project where they will own the product. OpenStreetMap.

  4. Re:Google is Today's Tom Sawyer by Gr33nJ3ll0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Or maybe "Geez it would be nice to be able to spent 15 sec fixing that road segment that always results in google maps routing me around, which wastes 10 minutes of my day" Having worked with city and county mapping services there are a lot of little mistakes on maps that a simple tweak could easily fix. OTOH, if you don't want to, don't do it.