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I'm surprised there are towns this large not on maps. It seems like it would be trivial for a large company like Google or Microsoft to write software that scan
by Nicholas_C 13y ago
I'm surprised there are towns this large not on maps. It seems like it would be trivial for a large company like Google or Microsoft to write software that scans satellite imagery and cross checks it with current maps to see if anything large is missing. In fact, I would be surprised if they don't already do that. Although I could see this area of the world not being very high priority.
- 205guy 13y agoAfter reading the helpful wikipedia article posted elsewhere in this thread, it seems like the "city" is (or became) a refugee camp. So on old maps (the paper kind digitized by UT--and probably known to Google) it was just a wayside or a small market with a few houses. Geopolitical events led 10's of thousands of people to amass and settle there in a short time. Few places change that fast, but it's not unknown: mining booms and subsequent ghost towns (in a ghost town, the satellite image makes it look larger than its population really is). This is further reminder that maps are not ever complete, nor intemporal. The human world (roads, buildings) change quite rapidly in both growth and decline.
- roel_v 13y agoSo you find areas that are missing, then what? Fly somebody there to check out the street names? Remote sensing is a big field, of course they know about naive cross-check techniques like this, the question is what do you do when you find error. And the answer is: you focus on improving the thing that are most relevant to your business first, and war-torn African countries are rather low on that list.