Rethinking how maps are made to accelerate tech innovation

Maps are nothing new. Humans have been recording details about the world in maps before we had recognizable languages. Over centuries, this has helped us find food, navigate the oceans, discover the world, and encourage social and political change.

Now, we’re using maps to underpin all kinds of tech. Even if we don’t always see them hard at work, mapping intelligence is doing the heavy lifting in the background. From the car you drive and the package you ordered to the coffee shop you visited before work and the busy road you avoided on the commute home – all of this relies on deeply embedded maps to work at their best.

Digital maps are helping us move through it at a speed that would have been unimaginable a hundred years ago. How fast, easily, and far we can move through and understand the world is heavily reliant on the map’s detail, accuracy, and freshness. So, how can we ensure and bolster the accuracy of mapping intelligence to continue developing tech that keeps the world moving?

Why maps are the backbone of modern tech

According to Jerry Brotton in his book Great Maps: The World’s Masterpieces Explored and Explained, “maps” are defined broadly as “a graphic representation that presents a spatial understanding of things, concepts, or events in the human world.” However, when we think of the word map today, what we’re actually referring to is data, how it’s used and the purpose the end-user is seeking to fulfil.

Today, maps aren't just used by individuals; they’re used by organizations across almost every sector serving both individuals and other businesses. In fact, over the past few decades, the number of use cases for mapping intelligence has risen tremendously. Now, more than 20% of online searches rely on location data to provide an accurate result.

To keep up with this growth, the mapmaking industry must continually anticipate and accommodate evolving needs. However, it's just too expensive and complicated for individual companies to gather all the data and financial resources needed to meet those needs. On top of this, the proprietary nature of most commercial mapping solutions means the tech can’t always be used widely or easily, hindering industry-wide innovation.

Until now, people creating new tech using maps had to do a lot of work to build their map system – from adding their own data to designing it and publishing it to their application. Fortunately, there are alternative options available today.

Finding the right solution for commercial use

The most common option used today is to harness proprietary maps. However, this limits an end-user’s control over the features of and fixes made to a specific mapping solution. This also determines the level of innovation possible based on the resources that a solution provider is willing to invest in their product and the speed at which they do so.

Another option is open source maps like OpenStreetMap (OSM), although many argue they’re not extensive enough for this to be a viable solution. This is because open source maps are often built by a community of editors with their own priorities, not by a company specialized in geolocation – it’s essentially the “Wikipedia of maps”. While the community identifies and fixes issues, in the time it takes to find a resolution, companies and therefore their customers can be left exposed.

Thankfully, open data has become so good over the past fifteen years that we can build on top of it to keep the mapping industry moving forward. Instead of being constrained by the resources of a single solution provider, end-users can select a mapping technology partner that brings together the best of both worlds, combining proprietary mapping – including sensor-derived observations and probe data – with open mapping.

Your solution provider must validate this open source data, checking for bad edits or data vandalization before integrating it with proprietary data. If something isn’t quite right, data can then be quarantined, cross-referenced against other sources and corrected accordingly. These are the qualities end-users must check for when selecting an open, transparent and collaborative mapping solution for commercial use or new innovations.

For years, maps have been dutifully doing their job in the background. Now, mapmakers can offer more agile and accurate solutions than ever before by combining open source and proprietary mapping data. Ultimately, this will enable commercial users and tech inventors to worry less about making their own maps and focus on turning mapping data into something innovative.

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