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?

The Canadian government has launched an interactive map of former Indian residential schools. “The Indian Residential Schools Interactive Map allows users to visualize the location of the 140 former residential school sites recognized in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement as well as provide information on the current status and historical context of the site. The map has a search, filter, measurement and imagery slider to help users with analysis.” The map makes use of historical aerial photography to pinpoint the locations of schools that are no longer standing; many of the sites have since been redeveloped.

The purpose of the map is grim: to determine the potential locations of additional school gravesites. Generations of Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools in Canada: many were subjected to physical and sexual abuse, and thousands died of disease or neglect. In the past few years, unmarked graves have been found at several residential school sites across Canada, and searches are under way at many others. This map makes available to searchers imagery that was otherwise difficult to access. (The imagery is also available as a dataset.) More at the CBC News story.

Google Maps announced updates focusing on EVs (EV charger search, nearby chargers in the in-car map, suggested charging stops, forecast energy consumption) and sustainability (lower-carbon travel options rolling out in 15 cities, estimated flight emissions). Also, Street View came to Kazakhstan last month. Meanwhile, Ben Schoon at 9to5Google says that while Google Maps on Android Auto is “a pretty solid experience,” it’s a different matter when you use Google Maps via Apple CarPlay, an experience he calls “a bit of a dumpster fire.”

Google-owned Waze announced updates last month that include roundabout assistance and notifications for the presence of emergency vehicles, speed limit changes, and things like sharp curves, speed bumps and toll booths [TechCrunch].

Vector tiles have become industry standard in interactive maps that, unlike openstreetmap.org, don’t get updated often, and where you can simply recalculate your whole database occasionally.

But the map displayed on openstreetmap.org are quite uniquely different! They get updated incrementally and constantly, a minute after you edit; it’s a critical part of the feedback loop to mappers—and how the author of this blog post got hooked in the first place. This is why we have to invest in our own vector tile software stack.

The switch to vector tiles, the post goes on to say, will enable all sorts of dynamic changes to the map: “3d maps, more efficient data mixing and matching and integration of other datasets, thematic styles, multilingual maps, different views for administrative boundaries, interactive points of interest, more accessible maps for vision-impaired users, and I’m sure many other ideas that no one has come up with yet.”

W3W maintains that their algorithm keeps similar combinations “so far apart that an error is obvious. We also worked hard to remove homophones and near homophones like sale and sail.” They rate the the chance of two confusing combinations appearing close enough to be unclear at about 1 in 2.5 million. But in a new analysis of the algorithm, currently in preprint, computer scientist Rudy Arthur argues that despite W3W’s claims this chance of confusion is far higher, and warns against adopting W3W as critical infrastructure (it’s used by emergency services, particularly in the U.K.) without testing and comparing against available alternatives. [The Register]

Previously: What3Words Hasn’t Had the Greatest Couple of Months: A Roundup.

It’s also been the subject of several parodies, including what3emojis (emojis instead of words), Four King Maps (four swear words, UK and Ireland only on account of a lack of swear words, which frankly disappoints me) and Maps Mania’s own April Fool’s joke for this year, what2figures, which expresses any point on the globe in just two numbers (I’ll wait).

But more recently it’s come under criticism for having similar sounding word combinations for addresses only a few miles apart: see Andrew Tierney’s blog post (which expands upon this Twitter thread) and What3words’s response. This is especially a problem for first responders trying to locate someone who may have misspoken or mistyped their location, or because of their accent, resulting in rescue teams being sent to the wrong location.

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

Previously: Google Maps Changes API Pricing, Competitors Respond.

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.

Here’s a silly Google Maps origin story about how “Satellite” was almost named “Bird Mode” pic.twitter.com/wj7CRJUEyx

— Bret Taylor (@btaylor) February 23, 2019

A lot of what we refer to on online maps as “satellite imagery” actually isn’t: the high-resolution stuff is usually taken from airplanes. This can be a point of confusion for some—and, according to this Twitter thread from Google Maps co-creator Bret Taylor, also a point of contention for the Google Maps team before it launched. Some engineers felt that calling the layer “Satellite” was factually incorrect—because of that aerial imagery—and therefore shouldn’t be used; others argued for “Satellite” based on label size and usability studies. It nearly got called “Bird Mode” as a compromise. [Boing Boing]

The print edition of today’s Washington Post maps the fences and walls along the U.S.-Mexico border. The online version, which I seem to have missed when it was posted in October, offers a much more detailed look: it’s an interactive, scrollable map that offers a flyover view of the border, fenced and unfenced, as it passes through farms, ranches, towns and impossibly rugged terrain between the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.

Previously: Google Maps Changes API Pricing, Competitors Respond.

Google is assigning names to neighbourhoods that, the New York Times reports, have little basis in reality—but once on Google Maps, those names swiftly come into a popular usage they never had before. The East Cut, in San Francisco, was the product of a branding agency; Fiskhorn, in Detroit, is actually a misspelling of Fishkorn, taken from a typo in the source map. (Searching for “Fishkorn” works just as well, though.) How such names end up on Google Maps, and therefore get a certain canonicity, is what’s interesting: it seems to be the result of a tech giant processing diverse data with remote fact checkers and not much in the way of local knowledge. [Boing Boing]

Web mapping uses Web Mercator. As Kenneth Field points out, this is fine at large scales, but at small scales you end up replicating the problem of using the Mercator projection on a wall map of the world.¹ Zoom out in Apple Maps: using the map layer you get a Mercator; using imagery you get a virtual globe (basically, an orthographic projection you can spin). Ditto in Google Earth. But Google Maps, after some tests and starts, now does this in its map layer—and not just in Chrome, either. This means, among other things, that Antarctica is usably visible, as are the Arctic regions—and, of course, Greenland is its proper size at small scales.