Google opens up Mapmaker Data for Kenya

This is exciting enough to rouse me from my blogging lull.

Google announced in this blog post that they are making the map maker data for Kenya available under a pseudo creative commons license for non-commercial use. Governments, non-profits and individuals are allowed to use the data in any non-commercial way with attribution.

If you remember from my previous blog post, my reservation about map maker was that the data was not owned by the public. All though this announcement does not put the data into the public domain it goes a long way to eventually making it happen.

Another positive is that this opens the possibility of data portability with Open Street maps.

This is exciting news and I hope this trial is successful so that more countries can get access to their mapping data.

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gis, google earth, mapping, gps, map maker, open gis data

Mapping the "Dark Continent"

Mapping services like mapquest, yahoo maps, google maps and map-based gps units do not work in most African countries. This is because there is no GIS data for these places. This is a problem that needs a tropically tolerant solution and I am glad to say that Google might have the answer.

Google is using crowdsourcing to solve this problem in India. What they are dong is providing software that allows local people to draw/overlay GIS data on top of satellite imagery. This project came to light at the Cambridge Conference in July. Michael Jones, CTO of Google Earth talked about this in his presentation at the conference. Phil Bridges has an audio recording of the talk in this post and the relevant part of the talk has been transcribed by Dan Karran in this other post.

I think getting the data is one part of the solution. The second part of it, is how the data is used. In Ghana, most of the streets do not have street signs. So giving someone directions based on street names and house numbers will probably not be a tropically tolerant use of the data. The question is will Google go the extra mile and provide directions that make sense in the appropriate cultural context ?

I am also curious about who ends up owning the data ? It will be great if Google allows the community to own all of the data or a portion of licensing fees, etc ?

Technorati Tags:
tropically tolerant, tropicallytolerant, mapping, gis, google earth