New Delhi: On a warm day, in the deserted Knowledge Park in Greater Noida, Sanyam Jain stands at an intersection with a clipboard in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. He looks intently at his surroundings—a bus stop, a food kiosk, a photocopy shop—and makes quick notes.
Then, looking at his phone, he sets off at a purposeful pace down the road, looking like a prosperous surveyor with a lot of surveying on his mind. “Everything in Greater Noida is far away from everything else —even simple things like photocopy shops,” he says. “People need to know where they are.”
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Later that night, after his wife is asleep, Jain will log on to Google Map Maker and mark the photocopy shop—as well as the bus stop, the kiosk, and the names of half-a-dozen colleges—on the Google Map of Greater Noida. And he’ll add more the next day and the next, just for the satisfaction of seeing his township swell in detail online.
From being simply a practical tool to find the nearest Chinese restaurant, the launch of Map Maker two months ago spawned an excuse for many people to go offline—to set off on mapping sorties, as Jain does, and to help refine the maps of Indian cities and towns in their own time.
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There’s no underestimating the power of local knowledge, Jain points out, sounding a little like a bank motto. “A satellite picture would never have been able to capture areas like Chandni Chowk in New Delhi” —areas, he explains, that consist of tiny, labyrinthine alleys invisible from space. “Or even that kiosk, for instance.”
Google had fully intended to rely on this local knowledge, as Mint reported at the time of Map Maker’s launch in late August.
In that sense, it resembles Wikimapia, a similar collaborative mapping tool that was launched in mid-2006 and is now a cartographic directory of more than seven million locations across the world.
When much of Google Maps still consisted of basic satellite photos, Google began releasing Map Maker in instalments. “First we asked our employees to build the areas they knew, then phased it to the friends and families of employees,” says Lalitesh Katragadda, the creator of Google Map Maker.
Google Maps works as a simplified graphic overlay to satellite pictures; a road on the satellite image will show up as a road on Maps only after it has been traced and labelled.
Map Maker opens that activity up to everyone, relying on the crowd sourcing for breadth and accuracy much as Wikipedia does.