Thursday, August 14. 2008

Maps of Georgia (or lack thereof) Cause Google to Scramble; Use Virtual Earth

Where's the street map of the Republic of Georgia? Some media outlets are crying foul as Google scrambles to explain why they did not have any maps of the war-torn region. You can get satellite images for sure but the road detail is vacant. So, don't go searching for detail around Tbilisi or Gori. Miguel Helft, writing in the New York Times, interviews folks at Google who say simply that they never had very good coverage in this region and did not intentionally remove any data.

Not so for Yahoo Maps. Road data on Yahoo does exist but looks no better than the old 1:100,000 Defence Mapping Agency (now NGA) maps so it, too, is somewhat incomplete. Zooming to street level will show that neither Yahoo nor Google has any coverage.

But the winner is Microsoft Virtual Earth. Now, whether this was done recently, only they know for sure, but the road detail is excellent. Perhaps folks from the VE group can chime in here.

I would not put this all on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Politically sensitive regions have little detail. Take the disputed region of Kashmir. It has great satellite imagery (almost too good) but no road data. And the imagery is spotty. For an interesting example, use this link to a KMZ file of Skardu, a small town in Pakistan, very close to the border with India. The imagery is extraordinary but don't pan away too far or you will lose the higher resolution image.

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