[a3_nm]

> An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps.

Meanwhile, there is another program to build the world's best maps, which is quite the opposite of secretive, involves hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world, offers public dumps under a free license, and has already outperformed Google for some areas and use cases: http://www.openstreetmap.org/

[tonfa]

If they built the same kind of tools as what GT uses, maybe they could make better use of the thousand of volunteers?

[yellowbkpk]

After seeing tons of videos detailing the tools Google uses for their maps and using Google Map Maker, the OSM tools are much better at empowering the mapper to create map data.

OSM might not have the computer vision tools or the Street View imagery, but there's still plenty of work to do with the existing tools and data.

[femto]

I'd anticipate that OSM will get machine vision in the future. Consider that that a typical phone/tablet now has a GPS, camera and decent computing resources. It's begging for a machine vision application, which records video and automatically extracts mapping information, ready for uploading to OSM. Begging to the point, where I think it's just a matter of time.

As an aside, are there any efforts afoot to decentralise OSM? It seems well suited to a geographically distributed database, with each country/area looking after it's own map, and the whole being drawn together by a common markup language. Assembling a global map would be a matter of crawling a network of servers, rather than downloading from a single source.

[a3_nm]

> It's begging for a machine vision application, which records video and...

A simpler use case for computer vision I could think of with Openstreetmap would be to automatically extract roads and building shapes from satellite imagery (though I hope that the license to use Bing would extend to something like this).

> As an aside, are there any efforts afoot to decentralise OSM?

Well, even Wikipedia's not decentralized yet and has no obvious plans to, so...

[ZeroGravitas]

Automatic tracing of roads from Bing provided aerial photos, with code provided by MSFT, 18 months ago:

http://youtu.be/LR0WV2dGIRc

http://magicshop.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx

[yellowbkpk]

Speaking as someone that wrote some code that interfaces with the Magicshop API, it works nowhere near as good as described in the video. It's a simple color matching algorithm that gets easily fooled by trees and dry grass.

The project is a great start, but has basically been abandoned.

[rmc]

I don't think there are any plans to decentralize OSM. There is no reason to decentralize it, it would solve no problems, and would cause a whole pile of new problems. From technical to political (what's a country?)

[jonknee]

Google's map makers are full time experts. I haven't seen the videos you have, but it sounded from the article tht the tools are complicated but powerful. OSM needs to focus on easy to get contributions.

[molmalo]

Or... Google could open source their software, leverage the thousands of volunteers and let a giant leap be made by both, their own projects and OSM-related ones.

[rmc]

Google could let OSM users trace from their aerial imagery or from their street view data. That would be a massive boost to OSM. Microsoft let OSM trace from aerial.

[beej71]

In certain cases the Bing data is better, and in most, I think it's on par for my region (Northern California). Half of the Sierra in the newest Google images is snow-covered... not so useful.

But you're right—more would be better. I'm a little surprised MS went for it, but I doubt Google will.