The new management seemed to have very little interest in anything to do with MapQuest, particularly as it related to product road map and strategy. And with the layoffs and hiring freeze there weren’t enough resources to do anything substantial even if there was a good plan.

I tried to make matters clear and pleaded with the powers that be: MapQuest was a site built on map data but it didn’t make maps. In fact 98% of the map data was licensed from third parties. I knew MapQuest had to build a moat around the product otherwise someone else could swoop in, license the same data and build a better product.

And you won’t win any prizes for guessing who did.

Previously: Remember MapQuest?

Previously: Guidestar and GM’s Early Attempts at In-Car Navigation.

The bigger and more mysterious question for me is: Can I build a store off of something that focuses on contemporary cartography and do it in a physical location? Some people more talented than I have been able to pull it off selling their own work online. Only a couple of people in the U.S. are doing it in a physical space with overhead. With rent. I like knowing that there are places like the Map Center still around and I want to be a part of keeping Rhode Island quirky and worth exploring. But it’s not 1995 any more. I sell gas station 8-folds and prints of USGS topo maps and guide books and trail maps but it’s hard to sell information that someone on the internet is giving away for free. The value add of a paper map is providing that information in a portable, digestible and familiar way that includes context and that does have value. Lots of folks buy paper maps for outdoor activities, trip planning and conceptualizing space in large areas or putting on their walls to remind them off a place they love or a place they want to explore.

He’s looking for maps to sell: see the Map Center’s call for cartographers. As for the kind of customer Andrew is looking for, it would probably look a lot like Mary Ann Sternberg, who in a piece for Next Avenue writes about her history with and love of paper maps.

“The physical map has the same appeal, probably, as the vinyl record. It’s tactile, it’s there, it’s present—it’s not ephemeral.”

A nice piece from CBC News on the so-called lost art of map reading and paper maps, touching many of the usual points, featuring (among others) the co-owners of my local map store, Ottawa’s World of Maps.

I’m not remotely surprised that paper maps refuse to go away, that they keep showing signs of renewed life. I have a thought or two about this, and about the perennial question of paper maps in the digital age. There’s a reason this question keeps coming up—which these stories do get at. It’s that every new technology that supplants the old does so imperfectly and incompletely.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been dabbling in a lot of vintage tech lately: typewriters and vinyl records. In both cases what replaced them is demonstrably better: word processors do a better job than typewriters. CDs represented an upgrade over vinyl on many fronts, as did digital music over CDs later on. And in a similar vein, the ability to have a digital map of anywhere you might end up in your pocket or on your dashboard is an unquestionable improvement over having to rely on a paper map that you may or may not have with you.

And yet the old tech still has its adherents, and it isn’t always about die-hards and Luddism: there’s always at least one thing the old tech did better that gets lost when you switch to the new. Compared to computers, typewriters encourage disciplined, distraction-free and linear writing. Vinyl encourages active, purposeful listening. And paper maps aren’t just used for immediate navigational needs: you browse them, you study them. Each of these technologies fulfil needs that haven’t gone away and haven’t been met by their replacements.

On the other hand, the old ways had substantial barriers to entry. Typewriters require a lot more typing skill, vinyl is fiddly and high-maintenance, and the ability to read a map has never been universal. More people use GPS navigation than can read a map. Sometimes the new technology is simply more democratic and more accessible.

Which means that while I don’t think paper maps will ever go away, they’ll never take pride of place back from digital maps. (Then again, vinyl outsells CDs nowadays, so make what you will of my prognostications.)

Previously: Stanfords Cartographer: ‘Paper Is Going to Make a Comeback’; More on Stanfords’s Move and Paper Maps’ Comeback.

Update, 3 Feb 2023: Tom Tom is running with Killick’s take.

Multiple datasets reference the same real-world entities using their own conventions and vocabulary, which can make them difficult to combine. Map data is vulnerable to errors and inconsistencies. Open map data can also lack the structure needed to easily build commercial map products and services on top.

Making it easier to combine data—one of Overture’s aims is to create “a common, structured, and documented data schema”—sounds an awful lot like a way to address James Killick’s complaint about the geospatial industry’s lack of common data standards (previously). It also sounds like TomTom’s map platform, announced last month, is part of something bigger.

Given the talk about open map data, it’s not surprising that the OpenStreetMap team has some thoughts about the announcement, and about how Overture and OSM might work together in the future.

The lack of common, broadly adopted geospatial data exchange standards is crippling the geospatial industry. It’s a bit like going to an EV charger with your shiny new electric vehicle and discovering you can’t charge it because your car has a different connector to the one used by the EV charger. The electricity is there and ready to be sucked up and used, but, sorry—your vehicle can’t consume it unless you miraculously come up with a magical adaptor that allows the energy to flow.

James produces a couple of counterexamples—standards for transit data and indoor mapping developed by Google and Apple, respectively—and points to Esri as a possible force for data standardization.

Previously: Immersive View and the Death of Consumer Maps.

Basically, TomTom is building a map ecosystem that can be built on by developers and businesses: an apparent shot across the bow at the Google Maps ecosystem. And indeed that’s how The Next Web sees it: an attempt to “wrestle control” of digital mapping away from Silicon Valley.

TomTom plans to do so by combining map data from its own data, third-party sources, sensor data, and OpenStreetMap. I’ve been around long enough to know that combining disparate map data sources is neither trivial nor easy. It’s also very labour intensive. TomTom says they’ll be using AI and machine learning to automate that process. It’ll be a real accomplishment if they can make it work. It may actually be a very big deal. I suspect it may also be the only way to make this platform remotely any good and financially viable at the same time.

Previously: Mapbox Union Drive Fails; Mapbox Employees Trying to Unionize.

Previously: Mapbox Employees Trying to Unionize.

“When you are a global Geographic Information Technology company with a globe in your logo, you don’t shy away from the opportunity to have a great big glorious 8.5-foot diameter illuminated rotating globe in your new office building. But what sort of globe cartography do you design? How should this gigantic model of our lovely home planet appear?” John Nelson and Sean Breyer explain the design and construction process behind Esri’s new globe—a custom Earthball manufactured by Orbis World Globes.

Previously: OpenStreetMap at the Crossroads; OpenStreetMap ‘In Serious Trouble’.

Speaking of his ancestor’s legacy, great-grandson, John Eric Bartholomew, told the Evening News that the fact John George Bartholomew is recognised as the man credited with being the first to put the name Antarctica on the map remains a great source of pride.

Little known is that, in 1886, Bartholomew had a brief flirtation with considering the name “Antipodea” for oceanographer John Murray’s map depicting the continent, before settling for Antarctica.

More about John G. Bartholomew at the Bartholomew family’s website and the NLS’s Bartholomew Archive. [WMS]

Previously: Robert G. Bartholomew, 1927-2017.

My local map store—or at least the one closest to me—is World of Maps in Ottawa. Unlike other map stores whose closings I’ve had to cover here, it’s still a going concern: an Ottawa community newspaper, the Kitchissippi Times, marks World of Maps’s 25th year in business.

Join us for our Farewell Drinks on the 12th of September #endofanera #cartosoc pic.twitter.com/QzfPFmWrdV

— Soc of Cartographers (@CartoSoc) August 22, 2019

The Society of Cartographers posted a notice on Twitter announcing the formal dissolution of the Society after its upcoming (and now presumably final) Annual Summer School Conference. That conference will be held in conjunction with the British Cartographic Society’s Annual Conference on 11 and 12 September at the Ordnance Survey’s Southampton headquarters.

Apart from reactions like Kenneth Field’s, there is no other information about the Society’s dissolution available online, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s been discussion in members-only areas. What on earth happened? (Comments open.)

Previously: Whither the BCS?

What Facebook fail to state is the inaccurate manner in which their AI mapping worked. The OSM community in Thailand had for years, been working slowly on mapping the Country, with the aim of producing a free to use and accurate map for any user. Information was added backed by a strong local knowledge, which resulted in a usable GPS navigation system based on OSM data. Main road were main roads, and jungle tracks were tracks.

Then along came Facebook with its unlimited resources and steamrollered a project in Thailand with scant regard for contributors … sure they paid lip service to us, with offers of collaboration, and contact emails … but in reality, all our comments went unanswered, or simply ignored.

Sure, their imagery identified roads we had not plotted, but along with that came the irrigation ditches, the tracks though rice paddies, driveways to private houses, and in once case, an airport runway! All went on the map as “residential roads”, leaving any GPS system free to route the user on a physical challenge to make it to their destination.

Local users commented, but the geeky humans who were checking the AI, living thousands of miles away, having never visited Thailand, just ignored our comments. They would soon move onto bigger and better things, while sticking this “success” down on their resume.

Sounds like another case of local mapping vs. armchair mapping and automated edits, where local mappers are swamped and discouraged by edits from elsewhere. [Florian Ledermann]

Previously: OpenStreetMap at the Crossroads.

Routing is the most powerful tool we have to reduce the environmental impact of driving, make cities quieter, safer, and more livable, and fight congestion. And you are blowing it.

This might be because HERE, the number two provider of map technologies, was bought by a bunch of car companies. Or because Google is headquartered in the suburbs. Or that the financial world is fixated on opening the pandora’s box of self-driving cars.

But the end result is the same: bicycle and multimodal routing continues to be a toy, and driving directions keep getting better.

This might well be about systems designed for in-car navigation first, or designed to replace them; or that are aimed at what is perceived to be the meat of the market. There are undoubtedly solutions out there that address Tom’s points, but there’s something to be said for having that solution front and centre in a mainstream service rather than having to find it in a less well-known app or a dedicated device.