The GPS chip in this phone transmits speed and location data to researchers at the University of California at Berkeley who are using algorithms that will provide the driver with up-to-the-minute traffic information.
(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET News)User-generated data may be the answer to the GPS navigation industry's problem of outdated maps on user devices, say industry voices.
According to Ed Parsons, Google's geospatial technologist, the reason users encounter inaccurate road layouts and landmark placements on their GPS devices is that it takes a long time getting updated maps to users.
From the mapping of roads to getting the maps updated and onto distribution channels such as garages, people can expect their maps to be over two years old, even on new devices, Parsons said in an interview with ZDNet Asia.
Even buying maps online will only shorten the process by about a year, leaving users with maps that are about a year old, which is still not good enough for some users, he added.
The most time-consuming portion of the process is map collection, Parsons said. "Traditionally, people captured [road data] by driving around. To update the data, they drove over the same routes again. This manual [process] has been time-consuming and costly, but it's been the only way to do it up till now."
The industry is moving toward making information available in real time, to push out updates faster, he said.
Incidentally, the Automobile Association of Singapore on Tuesday announced a GPS-based device it calls TrafficGEM, aimed at providing more up-to-date information for motorists.
Although its map does not reflect changes in roads, the real-time traffic alerts are hoped to alert users to temporarily valid information such as traffic jams.
The power of user-generated data
Parsons said the industry has warmed up to the trend of harnessing user responses to supplement map data, by offering users tools with which they can feed back information.
Google has a site, Map Maker, that works with its Google Maps service.
Maps provider Tele Atlas too said it integrates user contributions as an "additional source," which has been helpful in geographically dispersed and rural areas that are less frequently covered by its surveyors.
Tele Atlas Asia-Pacific director of operations Arnout Desmet said in an e-mail that road information changes between 10 percent to 15 percent each year, and more so in busy urban areas.
He said updates are pushed out four times a year, with the help of "tens of thousands of global sources, ranging from mapping vehicles and digital cartographers to zoning boards and public safety officials to construction companies and truck drivers, satellite and aerial imagery and government documents."
Geraldine Kor, director of customer marketing, Asia-Pacific, at Navteq, said keeping maps updated involves some 80,000 sources, which include professional cartographers and "the input from more than 100 million users every day."
Navteq offers an online tool it calls Map Reporter, which lets users suggest changes in maps. Once users identify such a change, the information is verified before it is added to Navteq's database, she said.
She did suggest, however, that some inaccuracies users faced result from them having outdated maps. "We find that many Map Reporter submissions prove to be about locations we already have in our map, but are not in the version of the map the consumer is using."
There are some map players who do not agree with the notion of harnessing user-generated data. Singapore-based maps site Streetirectory.com, said in an earlier interview the site's strength was its professionally collected data.
Its managing director, Firdhaus Akber, said competitors like Google Maps, which allow users to tag locations have introduced inaccuracies into their maps, as a result.
Google's Parsons said: "There is always value in high-quality cartography. What has changed is it's much easier to enter the mapping market. [Map makers] have to work harder to win users."
Victoria Ho of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.
Just recently, Softbank Mobile, Japan's biggest cell phone carrier, signed a deal with Aoyama Gakuin University to provide iPhone 3Gs to 1,000 students to keep tabs of their attendance via the phone's Global Positioning System. The company now has a plan to equip the same amount of elementary-school students with GPS phones.
The iPhone 3G is one of the most popular GPS-enabled cell phones.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)However, the purpose this time is much more serious than nabbing truants. As reported by the Associated Press, this is to test how GPS-enabled cell phones can help track the spreading of an infectious disease and stop it from becoming a pandemic. This is part of the Japanese government's effort to promote Japan's Internet and cellular infrastructure to new users.
This government-backed experiment uses a virtual sickness that is highly contagious. A few months from now, a few students will be chosen to be "infected" with this sickness. Their movements will then be tracked via their cell phones and compared with other students. Stored GPS data can then be used to determine which children have crossed paths with the infected students and are at risk of having contracted the disease.
The families of exposed students will be notified via cell phone messages with instructions on how to get them checked out by doctors. In a real-world outbreak, this could help better control the rate of new infections.
The significance of this level of control is demonstrated via Softbank's calculation: If an infected person spreads the illness to another three people per day, and each newly infected person then makes another three people sick, on the 10th day about 60,000 people would catch the disease. However, if each sick person only infected two people a day, after 10 days, then only about 1,500 people would get sick.
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Massachusetts police used cell phone tracing via GPS and Google Maps to track down a 9-year-old girl who was allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported on Wednesday.
Police arrested the 52-year-old grandmother at a motel in Natural Bridge, Va., on Tuesday after she allegedly failed to return her granddaughter to the home of her legal guardians in Athol, Mass., the report said. The grandmother had picked up the child for a weekend visit on Saturday and allegedly threatened to not return her, according to the report.
With help from the cell phone provider, authorities were able to trace the location of the child's cell phone and followed the journey of the grandmother and granddaughter by using GPS coordinates that updated every time the phone was used.
They were able to track the phone to an intersection on Virginia Route 11 in Natural Bridge and then used Google Street View to view the intersection, where they saw a building with a red roof that looked like a motel. Then they searched on Google maps for motels in the town and located the Budget Inn-Natural Bridge and confirmed the location using Google's satellite view on the map, the report said.
The case is "an interesting first (at least as far as we're aware)," Pablo Chavez, Google senior policy counsel, wrote in a blog post.
The Google Street View of the Virginia motel where a missing Massachusetts girl was found with her grandmother.
(Credit: Google)When consulting online traffic maps to form your plan of attack for hitting the streets, how often do you suspect that the red, yellow, and green colors indicating the various speeds of traffic flow are inaccurate, show outdated data, or that they'll change by the time you get there?
The concept of online traffic maps makes a lot of sense, but until they're foolproof, users will always be skeptical. A new collaborative project between UC Berkeley and Nokia is trying to provide mapped traffic data with more accuracy than ever before. How? By tapping into the ubiquity of GPS-enabled cell phones and the willingness of drivers like you to share your location information.
Here's how the pilot project, called Mobile Millennium, will work. Volunteers with phones running on T-Mobile or AT&T's services can register their phones and download the appropriate software through the pilot's Web site. Nokia does not need to be the manufacturer of the hardware, but the phone obviously needs GPS and has to be able to run Java applications, like Blackberries and iPhones. And yes, right now, you do need to live in the Bay Area.
Registration is free and takes less than five minutes. At this point, your work is essentially done. As you drive with your phone in the car, you'll cross the virtual trip lines placed every quarter mile on the NAVTEQ maps on the program. When you do, your phone knows to send its coordinates and traveling speed back to the engineers at UC Berkeley, who have created the algorithms to process the data.
This kind of program will only work where there's a large enough sample size to analyze, and that may not happen for a several months or even years. The advantage of this program, however, is that people with cell phones drive on roads that traffic cameras and actual trip lines simply cannot access to provide travel information. Imagine having access to traffic stats for city streets, rural roads, and vacation routes--and not just commuter thoroughfares.
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