Google have started to publicly move their maps away from Tele Atlas to their own multi-sourced data. There has been some speculation that Google would move from commercial suppliers to their own data sources, and it now appears to be happening. As of today, the copyright message for the USA no longer says "Tele Atlas" but "(C) 2009 - Map Data (C) 2009 Google". The message is dynamic - so Canada and Central America still show the Tele Atlas copyright.

The Google blog announcement can be found here. Data sources appear to be varied and include the USGS as well as individual universities for their campus maps. The reference to the USGS suggests TIGER/Line. This might be freely available, but tends to be dated. Google have a map editing interface where users can update map errors. If they are updating TIGER/Line with their own (eg. from StreetView acquisition) and user changes, then I hope they will follow the spirit of TIGER/Line and release it into the public domain.

The blog post also explicitly describes trails, paths, and cycle paths. To me, this suggests to me that Google sees OpenStreetMap as significant competition in terms of mind share.

The blogosphere (OpenGeoData; James Fee incl comments ) is already full of theories that much of this data has been acquired from local governments and transport authorities with deals along the lines of "we provide free Google Earth / Maps licenses, and we get your data for free". The problem here: Most of these organizations charge the public for this data. If Google have amended the data, what will they be doing with it? Will they be making it public for free? Charge for it? Give it back to the original organizations?  Although it is easy to dismiss these posts and comments as conspiracy theories, Google have already set a bad precedent when it comes to walking all over copyright holders and data providers with their proposed book deal (thanks to James Fee for the Nancy Sinatra simile). It looks like the book deal won't make it through the US court. We shall have to see what happens about the map data.

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written by Richard M, November 06, 2009

This change by Google has caused quite a bit of discussion online which continues. Some has been strategic in nature. When taken with the news that Google's Android mobile phone platform will support navigation, the general consensus is that Google have the potential to dominant the consumer mapping industry. Although the Android news is merely incremental (iPhones already have navigation), TomTom shares have fallen dramatically.

The other side of the discussion concerns the quality of the new data which Google are using for North America. There are a lot of data quality issues with it. This probably isn't surprising as it appears to be based on Tiger/LINE. Google are clearly hoping that crowd-sourced corrections will fix this, but there are lots of reports of people simply moving to the alternatives. Can Google pull this off, or have they bitten off more than they can chew?
One of the better discussions is in this blog post by Peter Batty.

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