UK: About 40 percent of all web searches are for geographic information. That percentage rose to more than 50 percent when people searched from a mobile, stated Charlie Davies, founder of mapping firm iGeolise in conversation with BBC.
“IGeolise, and others such as Mapumental, tried to produce results that were more humanly relevant,” said Davies. “These no longer ignored important human factors such as the position of bus stops and stations, the frequency of trains, buses and trams and key details of UK roads such as the distance between junctions. Combining these data sources with average walking speeds and driving speeds produced much more accurate results.”
In early November, iGeolise won a European Satellite Navigation Competition for its mapping work. “However, getting at the data that could help produce these types of results had not been easy. While many public authorities and agencies make their data available it was far from easy to combine it,” Davies added.
“There”s a lot of data and it”s all in different formats,” he said. Data from different sources even when it was about the same kind of thing, such as bus times, was rarely preserved in a file in the same way. Before it could be used, he said, it had to be cleaned up and standardised.
Tom Steinberg, Head of the MySociety project that is behind Mapumental, said it was often public transport data sets that was not well preserved or presented.
“The data that is put out has often not been collected without much or any thought that it would be used by third parties,” he said. “Typically this leads to the data containing ambiguities or apparently internal contradictions that take a lot of time to clean up.” Mapumental would soon be letting the public play with its mapping system, said Steinberg.
Source: BBC
