A few months back, I’d written about an open source mapping initiative for the city of Mumbai, where surveyors used GPS kits to generate extensively detailed maps of the city.
Now, O’reilly Radar reports that Google is using similar methods to generate detailed maps for Indian cities. They refer to a transcribed speech by Michael Jones, CTO of Google Earth, at the Cambridge conference.
This is Hyderabad, and if you see the dark areas, those correspond to roads in low detail. If you zoom in, you’ll see the roads, and if you expand a little bit, you’ll see both roads and labelled places… there’s graveyards, and some roads and so forth.
Now, everything you see here was created by people in Hyderabad. We have a pilot program running in India. We’ve done about 50 cities now, in their completeness, with driving directions and everything – completely done by having locals use some software we haven’t released publicly to draw their city on top of our photo imagery.
The biggest catch of course is that the maps generated from this effort will be owned and copyrighted by Google.
