Waze Partner Program: Q & A with CEO

The PR is quite vague, but the basics seem to be:

The partnership program forms a mutually beneficial relationship in which waze and its users are provided with a base map for accelerating community growth, while the partner benefits include turning their map from a static and costly-to-update resource, into a real-time, navigable asset with significantly lower operational costs. Partners also expand their data set to include real-time traffic, community updates and reports.

The official announcement will be at the Navigation & Location USA event today and tomorrow.

Here’s a Q & A with answers from CEO Noam Bardin.

What type of partners is waze looking for? Those with data? Those with apps running on other datasets?

The partner program is aimed at data providers - primarily map providers. It is open to map providers of different levels (display, navigable, out-of-date, governmental) and, at its core, will take this data and return it updated and expanded.  Updated to navigable information, new segments, missing data (such as street names or missing streets) fixes to geometry etc and expanded to include real time traffic and community alerts.

Are there any monetary benefits for partners?

This partnerships is a partnership and not a data buy.  By sharing together data, the partner gets the benefit of crowdsourcing and the community gets the benefit of a more mature map.  Both parties can share in the revenue from selling the data, regardless of who sells it (the partner or Waze) so it is a win-win for both sides of the partnership. 

Are there restrictions on data use? What’s the license for partners using waze data?

This is confidential but beneficial to both parties.  Fundamentally - the program is geared towards licensed data providers.

Is there an API to use to access the waze data?

There are a variety of client and server side API’s being released to enable the data to be easily integrated into applications and web sites.

Will partners be providing data in raw form to waze? How will that work? What’s the time frame to add a new dataset from a local provider?

The data is provided in raw form and made available back in the same format or in processed format through API’s/

Is this part of the move to add OSM data to waze’s dataset? [Background: Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s community geographer, explained at the Location Intelligence Conference that the company was interested in using OSM data and was waiting for that project to have a license that would allow that.]

This is not OSM related as we are partnering with data providers who own there own data set and can license it accordingly for commercial use.  OSM data restricts from commercializing the data and so would not be part of the partner program.  We think what they are doing is great for the industry as a whole but for this specific program, it isn’t relevant.

Artificial Intelligence for Better Geocoding

There are two parts to geocoding: a good address and a good dataset against which to geocode it.

A researcher at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia is working on the first part. In particular, taking out some of the human error in keying in addresses. The software, a protoype at this point, is called IntelliGeoLocator. It’s developer is Matthew Hutchinson.

The head of the spatial sciences department at Curtin University, Bert Veenendaal, says about 70 per cent to 90 per cent of addresses can be geocoded but the remainder might be more complicated due to missing information and wrong addresses.

“The software understands how addresses work rather than matching it to lists of known addresses, which is what current geocoders do,” Veenendaal says.

This would be, in my eyes, a “real time” type of address cleaning, as opposed to the batch tools offered by Pitney Bowes and others.

- Sydney Morning Herald

Update: Toronto Data Sharing: The Rest of the Story

Update: What was the inspiration for opening up the data? A talk by the Mozilla Foundation Executive Director.

But the open data initiative was inspired by a keynote speech from Mozilla Foundation executive director Mark Surman at the City of Toronto's Web 2.0 Summit in the fall of last year, according to [Mayor David] Miller. "Openness and participation created a better Internet," stated one of Suman's slides. "They can also create a better city ... We can make a city that thinks like the Web. You just need to ask us for help."

- Computerworld

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Dutch Atlas Wins Top Design Prize

I don’t follow the design world; I made the requisite maps for my geography degrees and work, but now feel most at home with words. Still, an article on design in the New York Times did catch my eye; specifically this bit in the Fashion section:

Joost Grootens, a Dutch designer. By reassessing the type of information we might like to find in an atlas, and experimenting with different ways of depicting it, Mr. Grootens has created a beautiful series of books that give us a richer, clearer picture of the places we are looking up than we ever could hope to find on the Internet.

Thanks to his latest book, the Vinex Atlas, Mr. Grootens on Sunday was awarded the Netherlands’ most prestigious design award, the Rotterdam Design Prize.

The article goes on to discuss design in The Netherlands but I set off to look at the book, which was published in 2008. Very nice. It won another book award, too.

The Second Birth of Visualization

David McCandless is the author of the upcoming book Information is Beautiful (UK, published by Collins) also known as The Visual Miscellaneum (US, HarperCollins) to be published in February. He offers a look at visualization in a BBC article, discussing its second birth in the age of the Internet.

I found the comments, one from a student in geomatics, most interesting.

Oh, and here’s his website, with some interesting visuals.