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Grab is messing up the world's largest mapping community's data in Southeast Asia
Grab, Southeast Asia's top ride-hailing company, has hit a roadblock in its efforts to improve its mapping and routing service after running into trouble with OpenStreetMap, the world's largest collaborative mapping community, through a series of blundering edits in Thailand.
Grab, which gobbled up Uber's local business in exchange for an equity swap earlier this year, has busily added details and upgraded the maps it uses across its eight markets in Southeast Asia.
[...] Grab's effort to improve the never-ending quest of more accurate maps involves a multi-input approach that uses Google Maps as the base with Grab adding in its own information — "points of interest" cultivated through customer feedback and groundwork — and other public or licensed information.
However, what appears to be a focus on speed has seen it suspend all activities in Thailand — Southeast Asia's second-largest economy — after it was found to have overwritten data developed by OpenStreetMap (OSM) with inaccurate edits that were created by a remote team based in India.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday December 26 2018, @04:06PM (1 child)
"They scour satellite data for inaccurate road placement and missing roads. This may be a good budget source of corrections for countries with long-lived infrastructure, but Thailand's roads are much more organic and the satellite data is out of date"
Relying on satellite data - typically 1-2 years old - to update maps is a pretty obvious recipe for disaster. Every country always has road construction going on all the time. Roads are re-routed, temporarily or permanently, intersections are changed, new roads are being built, etc, etc..
It's only a minor point in this discussion, but: given the zillions of satellites up there taking pictures, why is the available data always so old? It seems likely that any particular square of earth is (or could be) photographed at least monthly. The process of putting the photos online is surely nearly 100% automated by now. Why is the data online so out-of-date?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday December 26 2018, @04:45PM
Current imagery certainly is available much more frequently than even on a monthly basis. How much are you (or more on point, Global Logic) willing to pay for that? Or coversely: why would the private companies involved in satellite mapping share their work with the world for free? (And yes, "government" could launch such an endeavor themselves and provide the data publicly for free - but that requires sponsors and there likely isn't any campaign contributions in it).
This sig for rent.