Google earth crowdsourcing map data
Tim Finin, 1:00pm 2 August 2007Dan Karran blogs about a talk by Michael Jones (CTO of Google Earth) at the State of the Map conference, in which Jones describes how they are capturing new data for Google Earth via crowdsourcing.
“Now, everything you see here was created by people in Hyderabad. We have a pilot program running in India. We’ve done about 50 cities now, in their completeness, with driving directions and everything - completely done by having locals use some software we haven’t released publicly to draw their city on top of our photo imagery.”
A podcast of the talk is available.
O’reilly radar described it this way
“Google has been sending GPS kits to India that enable locals to make more detailed maps of their area. After the data has been uploaded and then verified against other participant’s data it becomes a part of the map. The process is very reminiscent of what Open Street Map, the community map-building project, has been doing. The biggest difference is that the data (to my knowledge) is owned by Google and is not freely available back to the community like it is with OSM.”
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