GeoLabs

Google MapMaker is out. There are several geowiki projects, but when someone like google decides to have a go at the problem you have to take notice. First thing to note is that the MapMaker is open for a limited set of countries, one of which I have blogged about earlier. So lets see what the uptake of MapMaker is by looking at Karachi (a city of ~20million, metropolitan and where locals are cultured with a strong entrepreneurial spirit) it appears there is very fast uptake from the locals. Here is what has happened in the course of a few hours

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With local languages support:

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The same location under OpenStreetMap looks like this:

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This shows what great usability can accomplish. There are a number of important differences between mapmaker and openstreetmap. The concept of confidence doesn’t exist in OSM. While mapmaker allows users to state the level of confidence by indicating how well they know this location.

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The closest OSM gets to this idea is the tip about only mapping places you have been to.

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Mapmaker has a distinct peer-reviewed moderation process. Users have the ability to state the quality and confidence level of the data. This can allow the higher quality data to bubble up into googlemaps while work goes on on the lower accuracy/confidence data.

Another important difference is the separation of editing and browsing the map in mapmaker. In mapmaker note that you can select the data and pan around without the fear of accidently editing the features while in openstreetmap panning and editing are mixed.

MapMaker Browsing:

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OSM Browsing/Editng:

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OSM has a “play” option to let you get confident before making the edits but moving between play and edit mode means an all or nothing choice. While in mapmaker you can browse, select a feature and choose to make edits if you want.

Mapmaker Pick Editing:

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Another interesting feature is the ability to add events and specify their type and significance. This is an interesting paradigm shift in stating an event by going via its geographic attributes first.

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Now the question is will google play nice and make their data available under a liberal licensing scheme? Will there be a REST API? Can OpenStreetMap learn from this and get even better? What does this mean for national mapping agencies and commercial data providers? Is google now a competitor? Is it time for other to build even better tools for crowd sourcing or should we be sharing and have a coordinated mapping effort? Lots of questions very interesting to see how it all plays out over the next few months.