Improving Mapping Services
I was talking to a friend the other at a dinner party about online mapping services, and she said that paper maps will never die. The dinner party people gave a number of GPS-took-me-along-a-bad-route examples and so I thought about it. Why are online maps bad at all? Aside from shortest-path bugs, isn’t the best way to get from A to B the shortest way?
No, it’s not. There are a few problems:
1) Not everyone prefers the same kinds of routes. Some people just like highways better than surface streets, even if the surface streets could shave 15% of their trip time. Therefore, mapping services need to associate user profile and preference data to use in calculating routes, to learn where people like to drive and deliver them routes that are straight or curvy, bumpy or smooth, consistent or sketchy depending on what they like.
2) Some kinds of terrain are unmitigable. You really don’t want to take that dirt road into the mountains when you could be on the regular freeway. You don’t want to have to ford rivers in the bush when there’s an access road, regardless of other factors. So, the type of terrain has to be known, and weights assigned based on its desirability.
3) Temporal problems. Things like police, traffic, an accident, or some kind of disaster, those events which affect the transportation system at random times, should play a major role in route selection. Currently they don’t.
4) Surroundings. Do you want to drive your car through a slum, or through the nice part of town? Do you want to drive along a scenic route or through a landfill? The surroundings a car takes should be a factor in choice of route.
So, Yahoo, Google, Mapquest, MSN, and co–the first of you to implement all of these wins.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2005 at 9:41 pm and is tagged with preference data, temporal problems, paper maps, online maps, police traffic, dirt road, google, surface streets, mapping services, route selection, random times, scenic route, trip time, shortest path, access road, party people, dinner party, msn, slum, transportation system. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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on November 28th, 2005 at 11:47 am
It’s all about size. Small televisions, computers monitors, cell phone screens, aren’t popular because media is about what’s bigger is usually better. The development of electronic paper isn’t being made for the purposes of extending the reach of mobile content - that’s already available. It’s being made so that people will actually use mobile content when it’s offered on a large-view platform, like a newspaper.
Paper maps will remain more popular than e-maps until e-paper becomes available.