HERE Maps begins community mapping in India
You may not have known this but HERE Maps are essentially the first people to come up with in-car navigation. The business owned by Nokia has received a big boost in the Microsoft takeover of Nokia's phone business as they are now free to build solutions for multiple platforms. The company is currently present in 196 countries and they claim that as many as four in five cars globally use their maps. But this is just information on the company. The real news is that HERE is launching a community mapping programme in India.
The system is simple; anyone can simply log on to the company's website and begin to map roads that aren't recorded yet. It's a system the company used to map the whole of Belarus to great effect. Belarus was one of the few countries in Europe that cartographers were unable to chart out. Instead of simply leaving it blank on the map HERE got a group of around 600 local volunteers who were mainly geography professors, students and avid mappers to chart out local, addresses, highways and points of interest in between. HERE claims that the procedure was so effective that they had high quality maps of the small European country in just about three months' time.
This is the same system that HERE has brought to India. Of course user inputted data will be monitored and validated before it becomes an actual part of the map. The system is effective not only because of the vast and remote nature of India but also because map data constantly changes with new roads coming up all the time. The community system will help HERE stay as up-to-date as possible and also proves to be an economical process. HERE has tied up with a few universities around the country like SAL-Ahmedabad and Mount Carmel College in Bangalore. All in all HERE will have a team of over 1,000 people across the country to help create and refine maps across the country.
