using crowd sourced data in a commercial mapping api
Post on 12-Nov-2014
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John McKerrellUsing Crowd Sourced Data in a Commercial Mapping API
Multimap.com
Sources
Geonames
Wikipedia
Wikipedia - Implementation
Taking complete dataset and parsing it
Hosted by Multimap
Updated on a regular basis
Also available on maps.live.com
Wikipedia - Issues
Hard to parse
Special syntax required, people often get it wrong
Some people try to do new non-standard things
Wikipedia - Positives
People were really nice
Email got a quick response and initiated a phone conversation
Aided us in meeting the terms of our license
Weren’t pushy about donating to the foundation
Flickr
Flickr - Implementation
Not released
Wrap calls to their API in our own search API
Was developed over a year ago as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate capabilities of our web service APIs.
Flickr - Issues
Very little mediation
Photos are owned by individual users and other users have little discourse if bad data is entered.
Photos often had nothing to do with the location.
Potential for offensive photos
Flickr - Positives
Looks Pretty!
Geonames - Implementation
Take complete dataset and convert it
Hosted by Multimap
Updated daily
Geonames - Issues
Not a geocoding solution.
Geonames - Positives
Big selection of categories
Reflects local ground truths
Easy to update when omissions are found
Database constantly increasing due to community involvement
Geonames - Effects
One of the UK’s leading travel portals
Hotel search failures fell by 80%
Over 2m queries a month hitting geonames dataset
100% hits on the “British Museum Test”http://povesham.wordpress.com/2007/11/23/the-british-museum-test-for-public-mapping-websites/
OSM - Implementation
Not released
Link directly to OSM hosted tiles as a custom map type
Parse OSM planet placing nodes into Multimap database
OSM - Issues
License restrictions
Coverage
OSM - Positives
Coverage
Tiles could integrate well with our existing tile infrastructure
POIs could integrate well with our existing search APIs
Conclusions
Strength of crowd-sourced data is definitely around many people working on the same data, i.e. not Flickr
Can have really positive effects for minimal effort, benefits are ongoing as projects expand
Can’t build sustainable differentiation
Is there a moral obligation for commercial users of crowd sourced data to donate back to the community?
Questions?
Thank you
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