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>In other words, TomTom’s database somehow has roads from Parkfield’s boomtown days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years. No wonder why Apple remove
by bitcurious 8y ago
>In other words, TomTom’s database somehow has roads from Parkfield’s boomtown days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years. No wonder why Apple removed them.
Another possible explanation is the TomTom was using these unlikely to be visited streets as trap streets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
>In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.
- underwater 8y agoUsing streets from maps that predate TomTom’s maps defeats the purpose of a trap street. The plagiariser could just claim to have sourced the data from old, public domain, sources.
- bitcurious 8y agoTrue, but that is assuming that those streets ever existed. As far as I can tell from the article that's just an assumption. Although I think it would actually be possible to use once-real-but-no-longer steets as trap streets, as long as your sources are improbable enough. For example, if you take a map from 1908, remove one street, then add in another single street from 1920, etc., your exact combination of streets could serve as proof of copyright infringement.
- ska 8y agosounds like more work than just making some trap streets. It brings up an interesting issue though - ideally if you have trap streets you would never want to use them in route finding...
- qubex 8y agoI hope they have some manner of “shearing off” the nodes that represent those streets and break the graph into two disjoint ones. That way they’re off on their own little island without a ferry connection and problems only arise if you ask for a route to, or are starting from within, somewhere that actually doesn’t have any ground truth.
- mannykannot 8y agoIn the accompanying aerial photograph, the outlines of the old streets are visible - together with a couple of others that do not appear on either map, and which run at an angle to the old grid.
- megablast 8y agoTrap streets are one odd street, not a whole town. This is clearly not what is happening at all.
- astrange 8y agoBefore Apple Maps added transit mode and hand-edited all the stops, it was displaying half the Caltrain stations as "Southern Pacific". The data sources are more than happy to give you data from 1940.