On 6/25/08, Ian White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > finally, a topic worth discussing! if you want to see what the future of a > goog wiki-map world, india could be a good place to look--sure, they've > provided a valuable service in creating a base map, but at what cost? anybody > know if participants were paid or volunteer? given GPS devices or loaners? > any chance the underlying map data will be released? if i were google, i sure > as hell wouldn't make it available to anybody else--damn smart and cheap way > to get a 'good enough' base map.
I'm pretty sure the guys in India were using a beta version of the map maker software, tracing over areal imagery, and using local knowledge. Michael T. Jones said on that project last year: "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." from: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/google-uses-crowdsourcing-to-c.html (theres also a weak link of the developers of GMM being Indian, and a couple of indian blogs talking about beta testing and embargoes etc) The important thing to note here, is that there's no mention of GPS involved at all. It's all tracing on top of imagery. No need for someone to go out and "survey" - they can just use their memory. Thats radically different from how OSM currently makes their maps. Also of importance is the phrase: "Fill out all the details and then you can do routing and navigation just like in the big countries" Most people are not bothered about getting the data back, re using it, or letting some hacker play with it. They just want to be able to see it and use it, search on top of it, and be able to get driving directions using it. Not much community involved here - there doesn't need to be. _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
