Google Wants You To Complete its U.S. Map

There’s an old Stephen Wright joke that goes something like, “I have a map of the U.S. Scale 1:1. I spent all last summer folding it.”
Now Google Maps is seeking to make its map approach that scale by launching a tool called Map Maker in the U.S. that lets users correct and add to Google’s map of the United States.

The tool is already available in 183 countries, where the lack of good maps made it impossible for the search giant to create a useful online mapping service. The user-generated maps quickly became good enough for driving directions in India, according to Google MapMaker tech lead Lalitesh Katragadda.

In Romania, where maps were atrocious but the internet connection was good, the maps quickly became good enough for navigation in about a week and, a year on, is practically complete. In all, 150 of those countries changes have been integrated into Google Maps proper.

Now Google wants to have its U.S. users tweak its U.S. maps to make them even more detailed, into what Katragadda calls a “living, breathing map and canvas for the people who live there.”

For example, Google imagines college students including campus shortcuts or annotating the names of dorms. Suburbanites might annotate the map to indicate which parks have soccer fields or to add a new coffee shop. To make those processes simpler, Google is also rolling out new tools for editors. One lets MapMaker users see StreetView photos to help with their edits. Another is an advanced search function that lets you search the map for things like “all chinese restaurants in San Francisco,” to make it easy to see which ones are missing and which have incomplete data.

Map making started as a military and commercial enterprise, but getting the final details are too hard now for any company to do itself. So Google wants its users to fill in the details to create a map that’s almost as accurate as the territory it represents.

“Local information is the final frontier,” product manager Manik Gupta said. Still, only 30% of the world is well mapped by Google’s estimation, though every time fiber lands in a country, the Map Maker tool begins to take off.

But the push for the U.S., the two say, is coming because the States are more important to Google than any other country, simply due to the number of users and traffic.

Users are, in some sense, the fence whitewashers that Tom Sawyer famously turned the neighborhood kids into. That’s because the underlying map data and the changes users submit are not open-source, the way they are with a similar project called the OpenStreetMap.

Changes made by “citizen cartographers” are evaluated by algorithms to prevent mischief. As users add more changes, they gain stature in the trust system and can undo other’s changes and have their changes show up immediately.

For those who enjoy information visualization, Google is launching “Map Maker Pulse” a way to watch the editing of the world’s map in real-time view of Map Maker layered onto Google Earth.

“You can see edits as of a few minutes before and see edits replayed,” Katragadda said. “There’s no more inspiring way to understand the power of Mapmaker than to look at that.”

Come midnight, the two Google employees say they’ll be visible on tool as they plan to start editing the U.S., too.

Lalitesh, a Bangalore native who went to Iowa State in 1990 to study aerospace, plans to “express my local pride in Ames, Iowa,” by adding buildings and neighborhood markings on and around the campus.

Manik, also a Bangalore native, says he often has to rush from Google to the airport in his rental car and at the last moment tries, with little luck, to find a gas station to avoid the steep prices at the rental car agency.

“I’m just going to map gas stations,” Gupta said.

[Source : wired.com]