Google Map Maker: Crowdsourcing Cartography
The Google Maps team just announced the addition of a new feature to Google Maps: the ability to contribute to and edit maps through Google Map Maker. Users can now edit and moderate various map features, including roads, lakes, power lines, and bike trails among others.
While Google already allows users to create and share new map layers through 'My Maps', this is the first time it is actively looking for help in creating maps (almost) from the ground up.
However, before you get carried away with the hope of wreaking havoc upon the maps of the world, editing is currently only available for a very select group of countries. These include Cyprus, Iceland, Pakistan, Vietnam, as well as the Caribbean nations of Antigua & Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Trinidad & Tobago.
Basically, these are all countries that could, as the Google Maps team puts it, "benefit tremendously from local knowledge and expertise that you and other map makers posses, and we're excited to see how you put that to use."
Those maps that are currently available for editing vary greatly in the detail already available for them. Barbados already has a relatively complete set of roads, while Vietnam is almost completely devoid of any details outside of the major cities and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are nothing but gray blobs on the map so far.
The editing functions of Map Maker are extremely easy to use and it is probably only a question of time before more users start using their local knowledge to add to these often bare maps. For most of us, however, the real question is when Google will open up the rest of its maps for editing at this low level - or if this is even desirable.
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Ok this is great! I only recently discovered that I can see my house on Google Maps. At the beginning of the year I couldn't. But the name of my village (yes I live in a village) wasn't on the map. Now I can enter these details. Google's good for something after all ;-)
Using crowdsourcing IMHO should come along with opening up the terms of use. Otherwise http://www.openstreetmap.org will be the better choice if you want to use the data as you like. But people don't seem to have a problem with contributing data to a company: they helped facebook with translations and they will help google with their map.
I am wondering, if google will add the abilities for editing to their google maps API. This would be nice, because everyone could use those controls for enabling users to draw polygons etc.
This move by Google is not as subtle as it seems, and it has the potential to be quite disruptive. I think Thoms R. makes an interesting point in terms of data ownership when data production efforts are crowd-sourced.
There is an ever growing debate in the geospatial community/industry with regard to this move by Google as well as by Microsoft's recent GoVE effort that is aimed at integrating local/state aerial photography into MS Virtual Earth ( http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/archive/2008/06/23/publish-your-aerial-photography-to-virtual-earth.aspx ).
Here are a few pointers:
http://www.blinkgeo.com/2008/06/google-releases-map-maker-what-about-openstreetmap/
http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2008/06/23/microsoft-would-like-to-publish-your-citys-aerial-imagery/
http://sprovoost.nl/2008/06/24/google-map-maker-and-openstreetmap-my-five-cents/
Here's the openstreetmap Barbados maps (as a comparison to to the Google one):
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=13.15&lon=-59.525&zoom=12&layers=B00FT
The Google one certainly looks more complete, but it's depressing to think that information was put in by volunteers in such a way that Google effectively owns it, instead of putting it into a system like OSM.
Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll release OSM-compatible exports of their data under a useful license though.