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Why would Google do that?
by nyellin 14y ago
Why would Google do that?
- AndrewDucker 14y agoI assume they're currently paying license fees, and spending lots of money on keeping their systems up to date. Switching to open data would hopefully reduce both factors.
- arethuza 14y agoI routinely switch between 4 different map and map-based services (Google Maps for Streetview, Bing Maps for Ordnance Survey maps, OpenStreetMap for paths and Geograph for pictures overlayed on OS grid cells) - I'd love to have some way of combining these.
- follower 14y agoNot sure in what context you want to combine them but OpenLayers enables maps from multiple services to be used together: http://openlayers.org/ http://openlayers.org/
- arethuza 14y agoSorry, I should have explained why I do all of that. I combine all of that data to try and come up with interesting routes to cycle - OpenStreetMap is great for detailed cycle path data, Streetview allows me to judge whether I want to cycle along a road (I prefer offroad) and Geograph is the closest you can get to an offroad Street View. And if I am going anywhere serious (well out of town) then I replace OpenStreetMap with OS maps from Bing.
- micro_cam 14y agoSounds like you are in the UK (Ordnance Survey) but I wrote a mashup to combine mapping layers and provide other utilities (slope analysis etc) for my own planing of off-road bike, hike and ski trips: http://www.hillmap.com http://www.hillmap.com It mostly covers the US and there are a lot of legal issues surrounding the different layers meaning it is difficult to run it as anything but a free site which may be why more people don't do this.
- majke 14y agohttp://investor.google.com/corporate/faq.html#toc-mission http://investor.google.com/corporate/faq.html#toc-mission "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."