Google enlists public to map fast-changing world

by Jordan Yerman | October 4, 2008 at 06:28 am

91 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

Citizen cartography, anyone? It seems to be working in Bangalore, where everyday web users are adding to- and editing- existing Google street-maps to fix errors and insert new elements.

Fed up with getting lost in Bangalore, the sprawling centre of India’s IT industry, a team of engineers from Google, the net’s largest search engine, has devised a tool to let web users annotate and amend satellite images to produce useful maps.

Within weeks of its launch, tens of thousands of Indians have filled in details of their cities, towns and villages, many of them previously blank spaces in even the most up-to-date atlases. The technology, which is being extended to other “information-deficient” regions, such as Africa, is widely viewed as the future of map-making and is on course to be worth billions for Google in advertising revenues.

Advertising revenue, even for heavily-trafficked sites like Google, wouldn't really support sending the street-view van to rural Tanzania, whose streets would get relatively few searches. However, if you're looking for a rural Tanzanian street, you probably really need to know where it is.

A host of websites already allow users to amend online maps, and some bloggers have accused Google of apeing nonprofit projects such as OpenStreetMap. org, which place fewer restrictions on how collected information can be used.

Google reckons, however, that its enormous online reach gives it a better chance of hitting critical mass than its competitors. Dr Katragadda says its map service has already achieved what his team calls “the genesis effect”, the point at which the wealth of data captured attracts a rush of users to the map site, who in turn plug in more information.