A new perspective on how maps are made to accelerate technological innovation
Maps aren’t new. People were recording details about the world in maps before we had recognizable languages. Over the centuries, they’ve helped us find food, navigate the oceans, explore the world, and drive social and political change.
Today, we use maps to support all sorts of technology. Even though we don’t always see them hard at work, mapping intelligence does the heavy lifting in the background. From the car you drive and the package you ordered, to the coffee shop you visited before work and the busy road you avoided on your way home – they all rely on deep-rooted maps to perform at their best.
Digital maps help us move through it at a speed that was unthinkable a hundred years ago. How quickly, easily and far we can move through and understand the world depends heavily on the detail, accuracy and freshness of the map. So how can we ensure and enhance the accuracy of mapping intelligence to continue developing technology that keeps the world moving?
Why Maps Are the Backbone of Modern Technology
According to Jerry Brotton in his book Great Maps: The World’s Masterpieces Explored and Explained, “maps” are broadly defined as “a graphical representation that presents a spatial understanding of things, concepts, or events in the human world.” However, when we think of the word map today, we are actually referring to data, how it is used, and the purpose the end user wants to achieve.
Today, maps aren’t just used by individuals; they’re used by organizations in nearly every industry that serve both individuals and other businesses. In fact, over the past few decades, the number of use cases for mapping intelligence has skyrocketed. Now, over 20% of online searches rely on location data to provide an accurate result.
To keep up with this growth, the mapping industry must continually anticipate and respond to changing needs. However, it is too expensive and complicated for individual companies to gather all the data and financial resources needed to meet those needs. Furthermore, the proprietary nature of most commercial mapping solutions means that the technology is not always widely or easily adopted, which hinders innovation across the industry.
Until now, people creating new technology using maps had to do a lot of work to build their mapping system – from adding their own data to designing and publishing it in their application. Fortunately, alternative options are now available.
Vice President of Product for Maps at TomTom.
Finding the right solution for commercial use
The most common option today is to use proprietary maps. However, this limits the control an end user has over the features and solutions for a specific mapping solution. It also determines the level of innovation possible based on the resources a solution provider is willing to invest in their product and the speed at which they do so.
Another option is open source maps such as OpenStreetMap (OSM), although many argue that they are not comprehensive enough to be a viable solution. This is because open source maps are often built by a community of editors with their own priorities, not by a company specializing in geolocation – it is essentially the “Wikipedia of maps”. While the community identifies and fixes problems, in the time it takes to find a solution, companies and therefore their customers can be exposed.
Fortunately, open data has evolved over the past 15 years to the point where we can build on it to drive the mapping industry forward. Rather than being limited by the resources of a single solutions provider, end users can select a mapping technology partner that combines the best of both worlds, combining proprietary mapping – including sensor-derived observations and probe data – with open mapping.
Your solution provider should validate this open source data and check for bad edits or vandalism before integrating it with proprietary data. If something isn’t quite right, data can be quarantined, compared to other sources, and corrected accordingly. These are the qualities end users should look for when selecting an open, transparent, and collaborative mapping solution for commercial use or new innovations.
For years, maps have been working in the background. Now, mapmakers can deliver more agile and accurate solutions than ever before by combining open-source and proprietary map data. Ultimately, this will allow commercial users and tech inventors to worry less about making their own maps and focus on turning map data into something innovative.
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