I’ve been having a hard time getting my motor started this week. There are so many distractions. No, not the kind you think. I am referring to those news feeds that I rely on to find out what’s happening of importance in the mapping, navigation and geospatial industries. Apparently not much is happening, but the Public Relations Departments – oops is that now the Corporate Communications Department (or has this entity been renamed FaceBook Fascination or Tweet Central?) seem determined to get out a rash of press releases before the markets and investors go on summer vacation.

The reason I am having so much trouble getting my engine going is that I am trying to birth a series of blogs on landmarks, pedestrian navigation and how this market is changing. I can feel the issues in the materials that I have been reading, but there is something hiding in there that I have not yet been able to tease out. I’m going to focus on this over the weekend and hope to have something for you on Monday or Tuesday that might be of interest. The unfortunate part of all of this discovery process is that I get “silly” (some would say “cranky”) when I am taking a really deep dive into new areas of research. But so what – let’s look at the news and see what fun things we can find.

Let’s start here.

“TA, a leading provider of digital maps (blah, blah (my comment not theirs)) today announced a license agreement whereby ALK will use Tele Atlas maps and dynamic content in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The agreement gives ALK access to Tele Atlas’ global digital map content and products, including content for more than 24 million points of interest (POIs) and additional map enhancement products that can further enrich the mobile device users’ navigation experience.

We are excited to work with Tele Atlas as a partner for digital maps and location content; their stringent processes and content enhanced with community input add even more value to our products and will enable us to offer the powerful navigation experience that the mobile industry demands.”

ALK has a nice product set and this sounds like a good win for TA. But TA only has data for 89 countries, so selling these data in 200 countries seems pretty optimistic. Do you suppose there is a navigation market in 200 countries? Perhaps more to the point, how many countries does ALK operate in? (Hint - it has offices in the US, Taiwan, Denmark, Spain, Germany, France and the UK). Next, I noticed that on the ALK website, NAVTEQ is listed as a partner, but not TA.

How about the remark “Content enhanced with community input…”? Since TomTom’s PND sales are rapidly declining, one would think that MapShare contributions will soon follow suit. And even that mean old Steve Coast (one of the founders of OSM and CloudMade) reportedly told an audience that “TomTom thinks it has a community because they can fix a street. They do not.” I agree with Steve on this one. However, it seems that TomTom thinks they do have a sustainable community and are beginning to substitute MapShare for real feet on the street in the form of trained map compilers and researchers. - Bad news for the boys in Belgium -UGC is not a substitute for field research, although it may be a good complement.

Of course, there was the following release from TomTom

“AMSTERDAM (AP) - Dutch navigation device maker TomTom NV plans to sell new shares to raise euro430 million ($595 million) to pay off some of its heavy debt burden.

In a statement late Sunday, TomTom CEO Harold Goddijn said the share offering “provides us with a substantially strengthened balance sheet.”

TomTom shares dropped 5.1 percent to close at euro7.10 ($9.77) in Amsterdam.”

Gosh, sounds like things are going well! Even with the new capital, your company is still only worth one-third of what you paid for TeleAtlas. Sounds like good financial strategy when your company is in a tailspin to dilute your shareholders by offering new shares. Now if that “MapShare” functionality could enhance sales and improve investor confidence in TomTom/TeleAtlas, things would be great again.

I suspect it is only a matter of weeks until we have MapShare on Twitter. Just imagine

“omg, I just fixed a street wid ms”
“where/lol”
“dont kno wher – im usng pnd -stupid”
“but knew something was wrong cuz was lost”
“did u no that ms is so slo cuz it goz to outer space”

Okay, Okay, I’ll stop.

Of course, everyone seemed to want to get in on the silliness this week. Here’s one from OpenStreetMap

“Want to get involved in OpenStreetMap but don’t have a GPS or even computer? Now there’s walking papers.

Walking papers lets you print out a OSM map and then write on it. Get home, scan it in and then that map can be drawn on top of using familiar OSM tools. To do this, it prints magic codes on the edge of the map that can be recognised when scanned back in to geolocate the image. If you don’t even have a printer or scanner, they’ll print and scan for you via the postal service. You can meet the author of walking maps, Mike Migurski, and try it out this weekend at the San Francisco Mapping Party.”

Although they try to explain this later in the note, it’s that first line about not having a computer that makes the printing and scanning part of the process somewhat difficult. However, even with that solved, those of you who have been involved in map compilation may have had the experience that this is not a particularly efficient method, especially when it involves untrained contributors.

Of course, Navteq had to get in on the good fun and decided to release two announcements. Both, for some strange reason amused me quite a bit. Let’s start here.

“NAVTEQ MapCare has been designed to help increase map update sales and revenue by providing additional selling points for navigation systems. “We believe this program will increase satisfaction and loyalty as customers will always have the latest maps. In addition, valuable opportunities for communication and cross-selling will be created,” explains Jeff Mize, executive vice president, sales, NAVTEQ. “It is a particularly convenient service for drivers of fleet or lease cars as it provides a clear channel to acquire map updates.”

How long has Navteq been in the map data base and navigation markets? I thought I met Russ Shields just after he started the business in 1984/1985 – and the Company has waited until 2009 to develop a distribution channel for selling map updates?

Of course, I appreciate the newsworthy-ness of a press release that is honest and includes – NAVTEQ Map Care is to help increase map update sales…”, although I thought you were supposed to mention customer benefits first, in hopes that they would buy the map updates you hoped to sell. I like this direct approach - “We have a new program for you. It involves you buying more map updates and us making more money.” Perhaps this would work in my consulting business? “I’m going to give you more advice and you are going to pay me more for it. This will give us valuable opportunities for communication.”

However, Navteq was guilty of piling on when they released the following -

“Offering up to 53 pedestrian-specific attributes, NAVTEQ Discover Cities enables an advanced pedestrian navigation experience while leading the industry in quality and coverage. NAVTEQ Discover Cities has extensive data that helps navigation devices and applications provide a variety of routing options to users - including those entirely on foot, or with portions on public transit systems. For instance, when a pedestrian consumer (my emphasis not theirs) wants the option to use public transit, NAVTEQ Discover Cities enables routes that take into consideration the location of bus and rail stations/ stops and their entrances/exits in relation to the pedestrian route as well as the train/bus network information, including transfer locations.”

Now, just what is the “pedestrian consumer” device mentioned above? I’m interested because there is the distinct possibility that I may want to buy one. Several times I have been tempted to just ram them with my car, but have always refrained from doing so.

A pedestrian consumer, a walker blocker – oh so many possibilities. (Yes, I know that there have been a lot of similar gaffe’s in this blog - but I do this stuff for free. In addition, my company is not yet quite worth the $8 billion that Nokia paid for Navteq, so your expectations shouldn’t be as high.)

Hmm. What really caught my eye was the mention of 53 pedestrian-specific attributes in Discover Cities. Do you suppose that those 53 attributes get added to the 200+ attributes (or is it 185, or?) they sometimes claim for their navigation databases?

Do you suppose there is a single street segment in the Navteq database that actually has all of the variables in their data structures for vehicle and pedestrian navigation? Or, could this be one of those PR-Marketing data structures that only live in the imagination of those responsible for publicizing the company or convincing a client that “What we got – nobody else can get”? However, if true, I would like to be the guy selling data storage to Navteq.

At least the Navteq press release get’s us closer to the topic of landmarks, so I’ll stop here and go back to thinking how to untie the knot in front of me. My apologies to the companies involved - I just could not resist.

Hope those of you who qualify have a wonderful Father’s Day.

Intermap Technologies, is known to the geospatial industry for their purpose-built, high accuracy, low cost NEXTMap 3D mapping databases that cover Europe, the United States and several other geographies. The NEXTMap program is based on the use of Intermap’s proprietary airborne Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Rader (IFSAR), which is employed to create orthorectified radar imagery, color orthorectified radar imagery, digital surface models and digital elevations models.

In the midst of collecting and processing their imagery, the team at Intermap began to conceptualize products using these data that were beyond the uses normally associated with elevation data and imagery. In some ways, the story is a Tale of Two Cities, since two of their new product initiatives, in one way or another, involve navigation. One of the applications is focused on PNDs and the iPhone, while the other involves Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), fuel efficiency, Hybrid Electric Vehicles and other applications that might benefit from the use of a road database featuring high accuracy elevation and position data. Today, I am going to focus on the PND/iPhone products, although I will cover the development of their ADAS database in a future blog.

Anyone who has taken the time to scan the Intermap website will have noted the gorgeous, accurate elevation models they produce. It was a small step to begin thinking about the role these terabytes of data could play as visualization tools and that is exactly the task that Intermap set for itself.

While most PND applications are focused on journey to work, shopping and task solution of one sort or another, Intermap began to think about the recreation market and how they might capitalize on their expertise with imagery and data collection. After all, PNDs take you to the end of the road, but rarely put you on a road that can take you any further than the edge of recreational areas. Was there room in the market that picked-up at the end of the road and took you to the great beyond?

Specifically, how about a product that could take you into the recreational areas, show recreational roads, trails, land use boundaries, hydrologic features, points of interest, contours and other information too numerous to mention? In 2008 Intermap began introducing just this type of product under the AccuTerra brand and chose to distribute it in cooperation with PND manufacturers, rather than creating their own device.

This week, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference Intermap introduced AccuTerra for the iPhone and won Apple’s award for the Best iPhone OS 3.0 Beta App at the annual Apple Design Awards session.

To quote from MacWorld

“Intermap Technologies’ AccuTerra, uses forthcoming iPhone 3.0 technologies like in-app purchase to allow users to buy more detailed maps of various geographical areas of interest. The program allows users to plan, track, and share hiking and biking trips. Users can activate the iPhone’s GPS feature to track not only their exact route, but also later “play it back”, including showing geocoded photos at the places in the trip where they were taken.”

While you can find out the detail about the product and other specifications at Intermap’s AccuTerra Mobile website, my interest is in the company’s focus on using geospatial data to open the recreational market to a larger audience.

In yesterday’s blog, I mentioned that Garmin was growing their recreation market, through the use of products, like its Colorado PND, which provide functionality similar to AccuTerra. In addition, it came to my attention (thanks to Duane Marble, again) that Google is taking a tricylcized version of its Street View sensor array into the wild for use on biking and hiking trails.

Look here for a photo of the apparatus, which weighs in at a trim 252 pounds (hope the one they are using for bike trails weighs less – by the way, I had to convert the weight, as it was reported as being 18 stone).

Clearly, there is a growing interest in expanding the use of navigation into the recreational arena and I suspect that it will be a lucrative market for those who can augment their data to provide the feature-sets valued by outdoor enthusiasts. Intermap has spent a considerable amount of research funds compiling data overlays that show up-to-date trails, land use, points of interest and other geospatial data that can be used to provide a display that makes the outdoors more current and understandable with less work than consulting a topographic map, not to mention learning how to use a compass and dead reckoning.

The AccuTerra HD product can be used to lay out a trail and view the rise/run allowing you to determine whether this one is too tough for you or just right. In a very simple sense these products (Intermap’s and others) allow you to have fun at the interface and provide a method of doing so that does not take years of experience to master. In addition, Intermap’s augmented map product provides a more comprehensive view of the landscape than can be found on most topographic maps whose cultural features are rarely updated.

However, Intermap’s porting this functionality to the iPhone (and the new iPhone has both GPS and a compass) appears a masterful strategy in that it harnesses the advantages of connectivity and navigation aids to benefit the outdoor adventurer.

Consumers can buy data (at the iPhone App store of course) only for the parks and recreation areas of interest to them. The data is resident on the iPhone so the application will work with or without connectivity. Supplied tools allow you to annotate the maps with paths and photos, and then communicate a variety of details about the adventure to your friends through links to Google Maps, Google Earth or through social networking tools like Facebook. Not only will you really know where you area, but so can anyone you allow access to your information, so the application also provides an additional layer of safety when you are out and about in the great outdoors.

For the first time in a long time, this is a product that is calling me to use it and I think that the focus on augmented mapped data for recreation is the next big frontier for companies creating geospatial data. Guess I may have to break down and order an iPhone and AccuTerra HD so I can help the market grow. Good of me, eh?

Last week, I spent a few minutes listening to the recording of Garmin’s Annual Shareholder meeting. In addition, I downloaded the presentation file and a copy of the company’s 2008 Annual Report, both of which included lots of interesting stuff.

Last October, the Investor’ Business Daily printed its belief that the bottom had dropped out of the PND market, indicating that the PND growth rate had been cut by 40% when Apple’s iPhone came out. However, this spring, Canalys indicated that worldwide sales of PNDs were up 18% over 2007 and that the market was now around 41 million units (I suspect that number is incorrect and that the total was closer to 50,000,000 units). But back to Garmin.

Garmin’s 2008 revenue grew 10% to $3.49 billion, a rate of growth 69% lower than 2007. Their net income was $733 million. A market survey included in Garmin materials indicated that they sold 16.9 million PNDs in 2008 and extended their worldwide market share over their competition, as can be seen in the following chart from their presentation.

Although the company refused to speculate about its sales for 2009 or make any financial projections, it is clear that they and the market are struggling this year and possibly longer term.

Curiously, their presentation did not mention the NuviPhone, originally announced in 2007. In fact, the only reason it was mentioned was the result of a shareholder grilling management about the apparent lack of progress in releasing the product in any meaningful way.

Garmin’s management indicated that the product was on schedule and that they were in discussions with several carriers about releasing the product later this year. The answer was actually quite humorous if you know the mobile industry and indicated to me why companies that do not understand the mobile telecom markets, carrier infrastructure requirements, carrier testing standards and the convoluted distribution channels in the mobile industry should try to avoid creating their own phone. Unfortunately, that is the path Garmin has taken (even going so far to develop its own OS). Nokia, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Apple and Garmin? Just doesn’t roll off the tongue does it? In addition, since we have no NuviPhone to compare, Garmin may not measure up well against the industry’s leading navigation application suppliers Research in Motion and Telenav.

At the Shareholders meeting, Garmin re-announced it was going to provide a navigation unit integrated into a car, unfortunately, the car is a Chrysler Jeep Grand Cherokee for the 2011 model year. If the transaction survives Chrysler’s merger with Fiat, it will still leave Garmin as a Tier-2 supplier to the auto industry. TomTom seems to have done better here, as it functions as Tier-1 supplier to Renault (for the embedded navigation system called Carminat ). It appears that the leaders in the PND industry continue to try and cross the chasm between them and in-dash systems.

One bright spot for Garmin was the growth of its Aviation Group. More interesting to me was the growth of its “Outdoor Fitness” product line that, in general focuses on providing useful devices for runner, bikers and hikers.

Although the market is still quite small, it may be one area where GPS, maps and navigation can be quite successful for companies like Garmin. On the other hand, do you need a dedicated device to perform these tasks? Maybe something you already own could do this instead, like an iPhone? Perhaps that is what Intermap was thinking when it announced its AccuTerra product for the iPhone at the Apple Conference this week. Let’s talk about Intermap’s news and why it’s important next time. In the process we will need to speculate on why Google mappers are now mapping … hiking trails with a nifty new rig.

And now for something completely different.

Before any of you think the use of “stoopid” is a typo or spelling error, please know that it is a takeoff on an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” , which I highly recommend reading, if you have not already seen it.

When I was still a university professor (just after the Reformation), I spent several years contemplating visual perception and the use of maps. In fact, my dissertation was on eye movements and map reading. Eventually I passed beyond figuring out how the eye and brain coordinated to acquire targets while “reading” maps and began thinking about the underlying processes. I wondered then if pattern recognition by humans was really a parallel process or simply an extremely speedy serial process that was advantaged by our neural network. I was interested in the answer to this question, because I felt that it might be key to developing an understanding how to improve visual search and learning.

Lately, I have realized that devoting any more thought to these concepts would have been a mistake. Do people today actually understand how to use maps or the purpose they serve? I have found myself wondering, in idle moments waiting for a link to resolve, if we continue to learn from maps or if that is an outdated concept.

While driving to San Diego this weekend to see the Padres give the Chicago Cubs a drubbing, I came to the realization that the using PNDs or printouts of routes generated online are major contributors to geographic illiteracy. From an educational perspective, those of us using these navigation aids are driving in tunnels – everywhere we go!

In the past, in order to navigate to a new location, a person had to examine a map, find where they were located on the map, find the location of their destination and chart a route between the two locations. During this visual examination, they were exposed to the topology of places, the distribution of features on the map and some geographic context related to the area of travel. Consider the modern alternative.

When using the PND, it uses GPS to tell where your journey is originating (you do not even have to know where you are). Although it depends on you to select a destination by entering some sort of address information, it creates a route for you connecting these places based on your choice of one of several routing preferences.

When using one of these aids (a PND or a printout from MapQuest, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or some other service) you pay little attention to where you are, since you do not need to recognize landmarks to identify your current location or where you need to go next. When your device indicates its time to get off the Interstate, you have no idea where you are and really don’t care, since it provides information on the next maneuver needed to get to wherever you are going. Eventually you emerge from the “tunnel” and realize that “wherever you go, there you are.” (Thanks, Buckaroo Banzai).

I realize that PNDs and navigation sytems provide a service, but is the service making us dumber?

I think that perhaps we are becoming a society without geography. From the perspective of many travelers, the world is simply a series of places connected by routes. Distance is meaningless, only time matters. Worse, places you do not go, do not exist. Yep, it’s now a Tinker Toy world, as routes are sticks and those strange geegaws at the end are the only places that really matter. Sort of like the Internet – I guess, as it too appears to have replaced thinking with cataloging, while converting deep thought into quick links.

If we ever run out of electricity – What are you going to do? Speaking of that, read this -

I saw a survey the other day, in which is was indicated that frequent travelers thought that power plugs on airplanes were the most important technology in the cabin. I kind of though that a toilet that could flush at 40,000 feet was pretty important technology and one that I would prefer to have over a power plug to charge my laptop. With all apologies to the comedian George Wallace I need to borrow his saying to describe the frequent flyers participating in the survey – “You people are sick!”, while adding my own - “some people are stoopid.”

A couple of days ago, in an article from Reuters, TeleAtlas Chief Executive Bill Henry said that splitting TomTom and TeleAtlas is not an option that the company has been considering and denied that they were in talks with anyone about this possibility.

Unfortunately, due to the problems with the world economy and a drop in demand in the PND market, TomTom (including TeleAtlas) is now worth approximately one-fifth of what it agreed to pay for TeleAtlas last year. Maybe Henry and TomTom’s management want to pretend that they are not thinking about this, but other investors are likely calculating when, not if.

The interview with Henry includes a lot of “market speak” – such as this gem - “I think the value is in the integrated group because this whole community is essential to the mapmaking process, and that community exists through the integration of TomTom and TeleAtlas. So I don’t think it makes any sense to look at them separately.” Huh? Whazat mean bro? I guess shareholders did not understand this either as share prices continued to drop after Henry’s remarks.

Let’s review the situation

TomTom acquired TeleAtlas because it fit their strategic plan for evolving TomTom into a content company that also could provide navigation software across a variety of platforms.

It is likely that the future value of TeleAtlas (presuming that the company is properly managed) will exceed that of the TomTom component of the business, at least that portion of the business focused on the PND market. While navigation databases will remain a required component of all navigation systems, it seems likely that PND production will be threatened by navigation functionality on mobile phones.

In the interview, Henry appears to believe that this is untrue and argues his belief that the PND market is a very solid category. That may be true, but if it is, why did Navigon recently drop out of the US market? Cut throat pricing, razor thin margins and increasing pricing pressure are three likely reasons and neither TomTom nor Garmin are exempt from these problems. Yes, the market will continue to exist, but the problem is whether anyone will make any profit from being a participant.

If TomTom does keep TA (and it will try to do so) the question becomes whether it can afford to invest in the company’s future and keep it competitive with Navteq. While TomTom’s use of MapShare is a bold initiative in this market, it is my belief that UGC should not yet be substituted for actual field research by professional map researchers. During a recent project, I was startled by the fact that Microsoft Live Maps and Yahoo Maps were more current in areas of New York City than Google Maps and this was the first time I had found Google to be the laggard in online mapping practices. I presumed that this has to do with the update cycles, but the differences could be an indication that TA, who is now Google’s main supplier, is starting to lag NT in coverage and accuracy, due to a lack of funding for field research.

It is my understanding that TomTom/TA has been selling off its fleet of instrumented vans. This is an unconfirmed rumor, but one that came from as close to the horse’s mouth as you can get. If true, it may indicate that TomTom is unwilling or unable to support TA’s in its attempt to challenge Navteq in data quality.

Finally, ADAS applications are beginning to emerge supported by data from Navteq and Intermap. TeleAtlas seems to be absent from this field. If TomTom/TA are waiting for this market to “heat up”, they will find themselves very far behind. However, it is unlikely that they have the money or determination to invest in this competition.

So, while TomTom may not want to part with TA, it is likely that their deteriorating market condition may not let them have the final say in this argument. After all, at today’s valuation, you could buy them and TA for a relatively modest price. The real issue here is whether or not today’s price is a bargain. I suspect that bargain basement price will be much lower.

(By the way, some of the team from Navigon and Cobra (a company that dropped out of the PND market last year) are now at Rand McNally in what seems to be a curious turn of events.)

As you know, I have focused the last few blogs at Exploring Local on Authority in mapping due to my concern that the wide-spread use of maps made possible by Internet applications has resulted in a substantial increase in erroneous maps and “map messages” that fail to communicate accurate spatial information.

The presentation below is one that I presented at the GPS-Wireless Conference held in San Francisco, California, last week. In the presentation, I take a look at Local Search and why the results of Local Search are riddled with errors. As mentioned previously, I think this is a money-making opportunity and at the end of the presentation, I speculate on the companies that might be interested in the opportunity. One, I suspect, will suprise you. If you would like to read my notes along with a smaller version of the presentation, click here to download a PDF.

By the way, the GPS-Wireless Conference was quite interesting. Although smaller than the previous year, the presentations were of good quality, informative and usually not too commercial. The panelists asked to present provided insightful comments and members of the audience asked fair, tough questions on when, if ever, the LBS industry is going to take off. All in all, it was a pleasant way to gather information, make new contacts and see a few friends.

I got an early start today; after all it was going to be good, old fashioned field work. I decided that I needed to take a look at the locations of the Starbucks shops I mentioned in my last blog (above). I wanted to find out how well the map matched reality.

I prepped the “Geotagger One” and tuned up the equipment for the mission (see in the attached photo) at our Secure Sensing Facility in Laguna Hills, CA).

Pretty impressive, huh? Ok, so I don’t really have the camera arrays and sensor equipped vehicles, or even the technology of a Microsoft, Google, Navteq or TeleAtlas. At least I had the wherewithal to get out there and see if their technology had been put to good use. I had a simple digital camera, an old TomTom, a pencil and a pad of paper. Oh, I had the map from Starbucks, a couple from Google and print Thomas Guide, just in case. Unfortunately, I did better at location the Starbucks shops than Microsoft/Starbucks or Google. I suppose everyone will want to know my proprietary techniques, so read on.

I prepared a route that would take me by eight of the locations on the map. The locations were selected by my based only on the rationale that they were along a reasonable path and that eight seemed like it would be enough to give me an indicator of the veracity of the location data.

I managed to find all of the Starbucks, but most of them were not located where they were shown on the map. I pulled up and parked the GeoTagger One in front of each Starbucks shop, checked the address (all were correct) and took a GPS fix no more than 10 feet from the front of the store.

Since pictures are so useful, I prepared a set of maps summarizing the results for each of the eight locations (one map for each location). The squatty dark green markers on the maps are where Starbucks and Microsoft think the stores are located. The red pins show where the shops are actually located. The green pins show the cross streets that were provided in the address information that accompanies the maps on the Starbuck website.

More graphics

By the way, if the distance errors were small, I estimated them from the map. If they were large, the error distance is the distance between the locations when driving (calculated by running a route on Google).

What might we conclude from this effort? At first blush it appears that Starbucks knows the addresses of its stores and the cross streets nearest to the stores. Unfortunately, it appears that Microsoft has some significant weaknesses when it comes to geocoding. About two years ago, I was told that they were converting to a rooftop geocoding source, but that appears untrue, or at least they have not reached parts of Orange County, California yet. Worse yet, it is clear that Msoft did not use the cross streets in their geocoding/mapping process.

It appears that cross streets are more accurate than whatever sources or techniques Microsoft is using and, on the average, equal to the tools and techniques employed by Google, although this may be the influence of one significant outlier. Of course, my method is extremely inefficient. Hmmm…maybe I will write about how to solve that in the future!

Google did quite well, but there were several troubling aspects to Google’s performance. In several cases, there were two close together symbols on the online map representing potential locations of Starbucks. One symbol was the familiar Google Plop, while the other was a red dot that indicated a location within the same category. When I clicked on these dots to interrogate it, I found it to be the same location as the Plop. And then the plop move to the dot and mated during my next pan of the image. Not sure what to make of that, but it seems that the data somehow merged on the fly. Interesting.

Of course, Google is now showing unverified locations on their maps. Isn’t that cute? What a bad idea!

Take a look at this image, made by pasting together two version of the same area. As you know, you cannot have two information windows open at the same time. So, I opened them sequentially, captured them and merged them together. The unverified dot indicates a malformed location that is actually several miles south and shown in its exact location in the bottom window.

Well, Google, you won the sweepstakes, but were disqualified on a blunder. I thought Google did a lot of data mining and data harmonizing. In the location where the Google error was greatest, the accompanying photo of the Starbucks location was a field of grass and brush.

Well, that’s enough for today. I need to finish up a report, so I can cover the taxes that I will owe tomorrow. One important lesson from today’s blog – don’t use Local Search to find the location of a tax accountant. You might be looking for the storefront long after the post office is closed.

I will delve just a little deeper into geocoding errors/content errors/map errors and how they impact Local Search over the next few blogs. These positioning problems are not going away if we continue to use the same old methods. We need to think about something new.

Hope all of you had a Happy Easter.

Many interesting things continue to happen in the world of geospatial, but over the past few weeks my attention has been on the basics. After all, Geography has now been discovered by, well, just about everyone and spatial data and analysis are as common as Starbuck’s shops (or maybe as common as Starbuck’s shops were two years ago). However, before we do a victory celebration, maybe we need to go back and look at …data quality.

As those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time know, I wrote a series of blogs on this topic in 2007. Now, almost two years later and starting on my second hundred blogs (yep, the last one was number 100), I am going to take a new look with slightly different focus.

I started thinking about this based on an article sent to me by Duane Marble on the problems the LA Times found in a crime mapping system used by the Los Angeles Police Department. I presumed that they spent over $300K on the system to help them understand the pattern of crime in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, two inept contractors apparently never tested the crime mapping system and neither did the LAPD (of course, it is possible that LAPD actually stands for Lost All Positional Data).

Through the sharp eyes of the LA Times reporters, it was revealed that the most dangerous place to be in Los Angeles was a block-face near the Times Building, City Hall and the new LAPD headquarters. Oh, wait, the reported discovered that this actually was a relatively safe location and the crime wave at City Hall (oops, I meant near City Hall – sorry Mayor VillarAIGosa) was just a geocoding error that neither the system provider nor the data provider (Psomas) ever checked.

Apparently crimes in Los Angeles were being mapped in Lancaster (way far away), Catalina Island or allocated to a block near City Hall when the geocoding process did not provide a valid result. In order to correct geocodes that cannot be mapped correctly due to some mismatch, the data gurus responsible for the project have now decided to take advantage of the distance decay factor and to map them at the lat/lon of 0,0 in the Atlantic Ocean due south of Accra, Ghana and west of the Gulf of Guinea. Perhaps they were hoping these crimes would be claimed by the Somalian pirates, but of course, they placed the crimes on the wrong side of the continent for that to happen.

I am sure placing the crimes off the coast of Africa is not a public relations coup for the LAPD or pleasing to the residents of western Africa. Moreover, I am sure it is inconvenient for the LAPD to find the erroneous data whenever they want to have a quick look. Perhaps there is some contractor wisdom here? Perhaps it is “If you cannot see the error, it must not be there.” (No, I did not steal the quote from Johnnie Cochran or OJ)

Seems to me that this was another good use for that Homeland Security money. Perhaps the geocoding errors were actually paid for by Homeland Security to scare off potential terrorists who might have been planning an attack on City Hall. I can hear the terrorists now “It’s just too dangerous in downtown Los Angeles. Let’s go the OC.”

Geocoding errors and data quality seem to plague most mapping applications, but are especially pernicious in Local Search, store finders, brand finders and other systems that pretend to deliver consumers to buying opportunities. Open almost any Internet mapping application and look at some areas you know, and you will find map errors, geocoding errors and other data quality errors. How can it be so bad?

Since I used Starbucks as one of the examples in my original articles on this topic, I took a look at the current Starbucks website and noticed that their store locator contact information now lists the nearest cross street. That seems like a good idea. Imagine the increase in mapping accuracy if the officers would enter the closest cross streets near the crimes they were reporting in Los Angeles. Yep, it would be an additional step, but it should improve the quality of the mapping. Wouldn’t it?

So, I queried Starbucks for stores in Laguna Hills and got this map.

You will notice that the listings include a cross-street as a store identifier followed by an address and contact information. Now most people would think that Starbucks would know where their shops are located, but my experience tells me this is an unlikely scenario. In fact, it appears that neither Starbucks nor Microsoft knows all the locations. Nor does Google. Let’s look into this next time, because the continuation of the data quality problem is both an embarrassment and an opportunity.