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Google crowdsourcing Indian maps: good idea to copy
By WDavidStephenson | July 28, 2007
Dan Karran blogs that Google Earth has enlisted public involvement in Indian 50 cities to flesh out details of its maps with information such as location of graveyards,
Google Earth CTO Michael Jones said at a recent conference:
“… I’ll show you one more thing. Lets say we go to Hyderabad, India. Now, it turns out that it takes more than money to get good GIS data, it actually takes data that’s available to get. Now we have a problem with that because sometimes we can’t get good data.
“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.
“So we’re building a little care package we can send to countries like Togo, and say if you want to have maps of your country, you may not have a national mapping agency of any merit, but if you have some inspired amateurs, you can map out your country. FIll out all the details and then you can do routing and navigation just like in the big countries.
…. the local people are the local experts. They’re not surveyors so you can’t really trust their locations, but what’s interesting when you have a few million users, you can do statistical analysis of contributed data. You can get the same thing from different IP addresses over a long period of time, with a high correlation, you can start to believe in it. You can show that with a tentative colour, and have people click on whether they believe it or not and have confirmatory comments. You can actually converge to pretty good data and it has the advantage of, when the road is closed, you can click on that road and say it’s closed today. If you’re having a block party, you can say the block is closed this day. Traffic data that’s up to date every day.”
I can’t help thinking the same kind of crowdsourcing/mapping could be invaluable in a disaster or terrorist attack: in advance, neighbors could input the location of elderly and/or infirm neighbors who’d need to be evacuated (obviously, there are privacy issues to be ironed out in this kind of case), while during the event, individuals could contribute real-time, location-based information, about what roads are still open, where there are fires, where individuals need assistance, etc.
Sophisticated satellite data is critical, but here’s no substitute for people on the ground who know the community.
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Topics: empowering public, technology, policy and politics, collaboration, e-gov transformation, networked security | |
