Mapping Hacks

I have been, i’ll confess, wilfully avoiding Google Maps UK since it was released. I imagined, fairly accurately, that it would depress me. Not so much the service in and of itself, but the critical reaction spawned in comparison with it, and the rueful reflections it provokes on the public quality of our own work with open source web GIS, particularly mapserver

As regular readers have heard me incessantly ranting, in the UK we don’t have the freedom as citizens to make maps in the way US citizens do; no access to sources suchs as the TIGER street database from which one can build a plausible mapquest-style interface, or a comprehensive geocoder for addresses. Google map data comes from transnational companies with access to satellite time and fleets of ground-truthers - an approach we’re proving it is possible to emulate from the ground up. It bypasses the Crown Copyright license and expensive data hire terms from the Ordnance Survey.

I’m frustrated by the business directory approach, which comes out in the hack i wrote for the book on local.google and local.yahoo, before Google Maps existed.

We talked through a lot of UI ideas and Schuyler borrowed some of Google’s for a mapserver based map browser package called mapserv.py, which is pending release. Dragging with the mouse to pan tiles turns out to be a lot harder than it looks, especially at a lot of different zoom resolutions, and the package doesn’t include that yet. Part of the problem is that we’re not Google; we don’t have an edge network with tera storage installed across the internet.

That’s why i didn’t want to look at Google Maps enough to justify writing this; i feared it would turn into an extended rant on the subject of “we’re not Google, and so we don’t have the resources to get anything right”.

If opened up properly as a webservice, integrated with services like openguides, wirelesslondon, it would blow anything we are currently doing with the Free Map out of the water; i might as well down tools, if the interface to the service is open. Sure, we wouldn’t be able to experiment with our own routing algorithms, build traffic simulators, or evaluate flood risk. But we’d have nice pictures of information to stick pins into.

Basically i am relying on US-based geohackers everywhere to deliver such startling novelty in application and proof of value in doing things with the TIGER data, building truly collaborative and responsive local information resources, looking to domains outside themselves for inspiration. Then we’ll have plenty evidence of economic activity to point to. I hope that will be all right.

Google maps isn’t even projected; it uses WGS84 instead of UTM. As an even amateur cartographer, this drives me crazy! Don’t these people care?

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