4 ms·
> It will take some time for companies like Google to pick up and implement the new data. But when they do, you will enjoy slightly more accurate satellite navi
by shakna 7y ago
> It will take some time for companies like Google to pick up and implement the new data. But when they do, you will enjoy slightly more accurate satellite navigation.
I wouldn't hold my breath. Google's adoption of updated information for anything other than the capital cities is extremely slow. On the order of the data has been in OSM for five years slow.
Google has photographs of my house from above, and from the road, and doesn't list the road as existing.
They're probably inclined to add this GPS shift data for the capital cities - but the mapping data will probably be inconsistently updated.
Especially as the state and territories provide the data in an incredibly wide range of formats.
VIC, NSW, SA provide shapefiles, which is great, as it is becoming one of the more popular standard. (They also export for a range of other data types).
The NT provides a strange mix of shapefiles and custom xlsx sheets. Unless you're looking at Darwin or the heart of the Kimberly's, you'll be looking at human-written Excel sheets for a lot of this.
QLD, the ACT and WA seem to use OpenGIS/ArcGIS XML files.
Tasmania doesn't maintain their own data, but relies on ANZLIC to do it for them, and seem to be in the middle of an argument over who will do the maintenance moving forward. (The last update to any of their public data appears to be in 2016.) This was shapefile/export like VIC, NSW and SA, but it becomes somewhat useless if it never gets updated.
If you're an islander, you sort of have to hope that the state/territory includes you in their dataset. They don't always. And they're not consistent about when they include you. Regressions are common. Councils tend to maintain their own data, but rarely allow anyone access, paid or not. If you hand them a FOIA request to see the data, then... Well, I got handed a series of printed XML documents, after six months of them threatening to take me to court for requesting it. Multiple island "councils" (often different names, but similar functions) did this.
- andrewstuart2 7y agoYou should be able to easily submit corrections to the Google maps data, especially if the overhead satellite data already matches. I was able to get my house and street corrected with just a couple requests.
- shakna 7y agoIt's been three years and six requests. I don't think it'll happen without someone from the team seeing it on social media. Hell, they have the suburb wrong, let alone the non-existent street.
- simsla 7y agoTried that as well. (extensively documented to show they swapped street names.) Ticket was closed after half a year without comment. They have a system but seem to be missing the processes.
- xbmcuser 7y agoI tried getting them to correct the location for the apartment I used to live in for months but it kept bieng rejected. I recently got a message 3 years after I had moved that my edit was accepeted.
- beerandt 7y agoWe had an issue, where they kept reverting to pre-911 addresses in places where there were geocoding gaps in the new address dataset. Even after submitting changes, and having them implemented, they would revert back, presumably every time they merged updates to the new dataset. I suspect the new addresses existed in the list and were imported, but with null coordinates. We stopped updating, because then you could at least consistently give people the old address for directions. (They did eventually do a permanent fix.)
- jimmux 7y agoIt seems to be resolved now, but for many years the instant I crossed into a national park the maps would be about 2 metres off from the location reported by GPS. It was just enough to trigger frequent rerouting, which would fail due to no data signal.
- beerandt 7y agoI suspect Google uses their own projection for maps in Australia, as they do in the US, which, depending on how they defined and implemented it, could/should add the intermediate layer needed to help resolve this quickly. But there are way too many variables to speculate in any meaningful way. Depending on how they store imported data vs different Google generated data, you could be talking about a simple transformation parameter change to their projection, or you could be taking about some complex, varying corrections. For instance, if Google was already using street view or proprietary aerial images for ground truthing, they may have already compensated for the shift in various data sets, in different amounts, depending on when it was collected, and how they handled location adjustments due to discrepancies. But being Google maps, I wouldn't expect accuracy better than a few meters for any given dataset anyway, given past performance.