New cartographers
RALLY de Leon, 38, likes to map out uncharted territory.
In the early days, he used paper and pencil. Nowadays, he goes around the city with a global positioning system or GPS device―sometimes mounted on his helmet―as he rides a bicycle around the city, recording tracks that he will later upload onto a mapping program.
He takes a car or a motorcycle on some of his mapping trips--and sometimes, he just walks.
The hobby helps de Leon in his business, a small courier service that delivers bulk mail―such as bills and bank statements―to addresses east of Manila.
“The problem is that you keep having to go out because of bad addresses in rural areas like Rizal, where there are no published maps, and this becomes really costly,” de Leon says. What data he could find from the municipal planning office was terribly outdated, going back to 1987.
Even inside Metro Manila, roads inside depressed neighborhoods are poorly mapped,” de Leon adds. “The established paper map publishers don’t go into squatter areas, but these people have addresses too, and we deliver to them.”
“When I mapped the narrow alleys in depressed areas, I just parked the car somewhere safe and walked because a bicycle could easily get stolen,” he recalls. “It’s best to give a courtesy call to the head of an the area and explain what I’m doing. I normally show them old paper maps and point out that they are not yet on the map, and that it would benefit them if the government sees that people actually live there. I saw a lot of populated areas in what used to be raw land and rice fields that remained blank on the map. These were large areas with enough people to decide an election, but they remained invisible.”
De Leon downloads the track logs from his hand-held Garmin GPSMap76 and shares these as uploadable maps with other GPS users. He also shares the data gathered on OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org) and Google Map Maker (http://www.google.com/mapmaker), two collaborative projects that aim to create detailed and accurate user-generated street maps. Like most people who contribute to these projects, de Leon sees the value in sharing information.
“It used to be a competitive advantage to have a ‘secret map,’ but the cost of ignorance is really too high,” he says.
Bernard Arellano III, another volunteer, works on maps of his hometown of Iloilo. A call center agent for Dell and a graduate student at the Ateneo de Manila University, Arellano says efforts like his will help the tourism industry.
“If the Philippines is serious about tourism, then [the government] should make the Philippines more information-friendly and accessible,” he says.
De Leon doesn’t know how many people do volunteer mapping, but he’s part of a group, Waypoints.ph, that counts 211 contributors on its Web site.
“There are great mappers from WaypointsdotPH who taught me the basics of mapping, and who were contributing to Google Map Maker, OpenStreetMap, or point-to-point destination track logs for the group’s Web site.”
De Leon and Arellano, as major contributors to Map Maker, were recently guests at a press conference to announce progress in the use of a tool that Google introduced in October 2008 to address the lack of high quality digital maps for 122 countries on its separate Google Maps service (http://maps.google.com).
“This is user-generated content in its purest form,” says Derek Callow, marketing chief for Google Southeast Asia, who was in town to announce that local contributions made on Map Maker―including detailed maps of Metro Manila, Cebu and Davao--have found their way into Google Maps.
Map Maker enables users to map and share knowledge of the neighborhoods they care about and know best, he adds. Information entered in Map Maker is moderated by peer review and is checked further by Google personnel before they are rolled into “the polished, global product,” Google Maps, where they can no longer be edited by the general public.
Callow says hundreds of thousands of edits have been made since October 2008, making the Philippines one of the top three users of Map Maker.
Like other user-generated sites on the Web, the information on Map Maker is open to error, self promotion and vandalism. But as the experience of Wikipedia has shown, errors will eventually be corrected by “the wisdom of the crowds,” Callow says.
“Peer moderation is complicated but we are committed to making it work as best it can,” he adds.
Although Google uses user-generated maps for countries such as the Philippines, Callow says there are copyright restrictions on the information in Google Maps. Using a map from Google Maps requires the express permission of the copyright holder. This is in contrast to the OpenStreetMap project, which allows anyone to use the data, so long as they mention the original creator and apply the same Creative Commons license to their own work.
But Callow plays down this difference and emphasizes instead the trend toward user-generated content in general and how it benefits everyone.
“A rising tide lifts all boats,” he says. “They [OpenStreetMap] operate in a different space. Google loves open source in general and competition is good. They can have a different approach to how that data is given back to benefit users.”
The stated goal of the non-profit OpenStreetMap is to create and provide free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.
Google, on the other hand, invests to make Google Maps useful because it enhances its main product, Internet search, Callow says.
“A large part of search is a geographical component,” he says, demonstrating how a search for “dry cleaners in Sydney” on Google produces a street map to go along with the results. “Making our map product better goes into our core search and that means higher user satisfaction with Google search.”
