Mapping Hacks

The eagle-eyed crschmidt and drumm spotted, while looking at NYC maps both via mfrumin’s flash overlay tool for plotting vectors over GMaps and via the main Google Maps site… the base maps look quite different. Specifically, there are many features and enhancements missing in the maps that come out of the API.

They reasoned out that the basemap data you get via the API is only from TeleAtlas, but if you look at the maps through Google’s branded gateway, they are enhanced with NavTech data too. As rich pointed out, there’s a long discussion about this on the Google Maps API Google Group, or usenet group as it was once known.

Conspiracy theories fly! Do people really care enough about very high quality base maps to pay for a premium API service? Or are geodata licensing costs driving this decision on the part of GMaps? If quality of service continues to deteriorate, will this provide a boon to collaborative mapping in the land of the free geodata, augmenting the accuracy and currency that Google’s maps may be losing? Answers on a postcard to the population of irc.oftc.net#geo …

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