TomTom users who choose to do so can anonymously share their GPS tracks as they go about their daily lives. These are consolidated and act as one of many inputs for Tele Atlas data updates. To get a sense of the amount of data collected, Jay Benson, Tele Atlas' VP of Global Strategic Planning told me the data totaled the equivalent of covering Europe 4x per day and the US once per day. He noted that the GPS tracks really give Tele Atlas two key benefits: better accuracy for data already collected and insight into new geometry that needs to be added. He also noted that the new data source means updates will completed more quickly, but there's no statistics on that yet since this is the first use of the GPS tracks.

To really get a sense of the impact of these data consider these graphics from Tele Atlas. Click on the thumbnails for larger graphics.


COMMUNITY INPUT IDENTIFYING CHANGING ROADS: In this example from a road in Poland, the yellow/orange lines show motorways from a previous release of the Tele Atlas database. The black dots are GPS measurements shared by portable navigation device users, which suggest that the motorway in reality is approximately 30 meters further to the South. The red lines are the suggested new geometry for these motorways.

COMMUNITY INPUT IDENTIFYING NEW ROADS: In this example from the United States, the white lines show a roadway from a previous release of the Tele Atlas database. The red points and blue lines indicate GPS measurements shared by portable navigation device users, which indicate that there has been a change in the real world. Tele Atlas’ other sources also detected this information, so the GPS measurements were used in part to confirm the change.

The beauty of this program (and why it seems to work) is that it's a no brainer for the user to share data. Tele Atlas does its part by putting out the time and money to collate, explore, confirm the raw data and then update the datasets. That's what users have always paid the company to do. Now the end-users can do their part by contributing their data. Further, they contribute it in exactly the places that matter to them!