A feature in the London Times yesterday discusses the race to map the planet. In the feature Sean Phelan, Multimap’s founder discusses Multimap’s efforts to map China, indicating that they’ve already added street-level detail in 150 Chinese cities.
Not only did Microsoft get a Web-savvy company with ties to Wikipedia and others, they’ve also acquired a firm that has a strong data acquisition record and ambitious plans to branch into India and Africa.
There’s also discussion within this piece about “collaborative cartography,” which has also been referred to as “crowd sourcing.” The input from thousands of users will go a long way in improving our data, until machines can think for themselves.
