Friday, June 8. 2007

TomTom MapShare allows drivers to edit maps

TomTom announced a new feature called MapShare on Wednesday. It allows drivers to capture changes in the road attributes that aren't reflected in the map data. The first look at what it is can be seen in the GPSPassion Forums including some screen shots of the UI. The press release has a lot of marketing-speak but the screen shots give a clue what they're doing. Drivers can edit map attributes and POI's but not road geometry. So it's not exactly OpenStreetMaps but it's a very interesting start. More interesting would be what TomTom will do with the data and the extent to which they will share the changes with the map data suppliers. I suspect they won't but that leaves the issue of who will validate the changes. That's a massive effort that TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ do very well. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
It's another step in bringing customers what they've been saying they want for a long time: up-to-date maps. Kudos to TomTom for this innovation.

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Is there any chance that you could contact Teleatlas and get the real scoop on this? It seems to me that if TomTom owners only report errors via Map Share and don't report them to Teleatlas via their MapInsight then Teleatlas will miss out on a huge amount of customer feedback. What if any will be Teleatlas' role in this?

#1 Chris Cooper (Link) on 2007-06-10 11:23 (Reply)

Won't anyone joke with drivers and change wrong road?

#2 Bee (Link) on 2007-06-10 12:48 (Reply)

Wonder why TomTom started MapShare. Is it really to improve / create maps or is it a way to reduce helpdesk calls?

I suspect they got fed up with the slow map updates of TeleAtlas and/or Navteq and the cost they have to make to deal with complaints on the mapping sight.

#3 john on 2007-06-11 07:01 (Reply)

Bee, this tidbit from Gizmodo explains how you can avoid getting bogus data.

Even if you don't sync, you will automatically see changes you made yourself, but if you do sync, you can also get, in order of trustworthiness: changes verified by TomTom, changes to assorted POIs you subscribe to, changes from sources trusted by TomTom, changes reported by "many" and changes reported by "some."

#4 Chris Cooper on 2007-06-11 18:01 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Chris Cooper on 2007-06-10 11:23 #2: Bee on 2007-06-10 12:48 #3: john on 2007-06-11 07:01 #4: Chris Cooper on 2007-06-11 18:01
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?   Subscribe to this entry