“Apple” Maps (or, “OpenStreetMap Reinvented”…)

Update: Please also read the further information about this post

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Traditionally, map applications on Apple platforms have made use of Google Maps. But iPhoto for iOS, launched today, ditches the familiar Google Maps interface in favour of a new map style.

The new map style has no attribution and the tiles are served from Apple’s servers using a URL pattern such as http://gsp2.apple.com/tile?api=1&style=slideshow&layers=default&lang=en_GB&z=8&x=126&y=84&v=9 . Here’s the tile image you’ll get from that URL:

The image tiles themselves use quite an interesting, quasi-retro style. Nobody would be surprised if they were told that Apple had been acquiring their own sets of map data in order to launch their own map product, dispensing of their need to rely on Google Maps in their operating systems. But have they?

I took a closer look at an area I know well. Notice how “Apple Maps” on iPhoto shows the road pattern in the area of Norwich circled in red in the following extract:

Now I know that folk here in Norfolk are a little odd, but surely our town planners wouldn’t have come up with a road network that mad? And, of course, they haven’t. These “roads” are tracks through woodland in an area called Mousehold Heath, where I often walk my dog. So how did Apple’s map data providers mistakenly think these were roads?

Oh, of course – Apple haven’t been gathering their own map data at all – what they’ve done is render Open Street Map data with their own stylesheet, miscategorised the status of some ways, conveniently forgotten to include any copyright attribution, and passed it off as their own! (Or, so it appears…)

Here’s the OSM map of the same area:

And here’s the two maps overlaid on top of each other – don’t they line up well?

I’m sure the OSM community would be delighted to know that Apple have chosen to use their map over Google’s – it’s a great validation of the accuracy and completeness of the Open Street Map data. Heck – the OSM data is there to be used. But not giving any credit to the hundreds of thousands of people who voluntarily put in time and effort to create that map? That’s a big mistake for Apple.

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Update: Having spent some more time reviewing the Apple tileset, I ought to just mention that the example above is far from a one-off isolated case. It seems that whoever rendered these tiles lacks any real understanding of how OSM data is structured. For example, the following image highlights three beautifully rendered, detailed areas of road network…

…which, unfortunately, are nothing more than the lanes in private car parks (belonging to Norwich Union and City College, respectively). Yes, OSM data is that detailed.

And those features that are rendered appropriately appear to be based on OSM data that’s two years out-of-date.

And, then of course, there’s the interesting choice of rendering style. I actually quite like it, but that’s because I’ve always quite liked pirate treasure maps, and the look and feel of the zoomed-out map image definitely makes think that there should be an “X marks the spot” there somewhere…

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Update 2: As two of the sane-minded commentators have rightfully pointed out (thankyou Patrick Taylor and JP), Apple is a big company, and it’s perfectly possible that this situation has occurred through oversight or communication breakdown rather through deliberate malice. Either way, I look forward to Apple co-operating with the OSM foundation to address the problem and, when they do, I will retract my statement that they have stolen the data without due credit.

One thing I regret is that I have no way of gathering further information about my commenters. Particularly:-

• If they have ever personally contributed to OSM.
• How many Apple products they own.

I’d love to see if there’s any correlation between their point-of-view on the issue and either of those factors…

The “Front Door Finder” App

No, sadly this post is not about an app that helps you find your own front door (which would perhaps come in useful after a particularly heavy night’s drinking).  Rather, it is about a recently released app that asks you to help locate the front doors of other people’s houses.

Huh?

Recap – Automatic Road Detection

Before looking at the new front door application, a bit of history might be helpful about the recent direction that Microsoft’s mapping utilities have been taken. You may be aware that, a few months ago, Microsoft released an application that could be used to automatically detect roads from an aerial imagery photograph. I blogged about it here. The images below show an example output from the service when processing an imagery tile of part of the city of Norwich:

Input image

Points on path of detected road

One interesting aspect of the service (remember this service is created and hosted by Microsoft, on their azure platform) is that the resulting points were provided in osmchange format – and could be used directly to import road data into Open Street Map. This would potentially allow OSM to create and mass import vector road data in previously unmapped areas automatically and easily, without the manual process of a user tracing the road path by hand.

The Front Door Application

The new front door application, which you can access at http://frontdoor.cloudapp.net/ follows a similar model of utilising Bing Maps aerial imagery to potentially benefit the open map community…. how?

Anybody who accesses the site is presented with a random aerial image of a location, and is invited to drag a single pushpin onto the front-door of the nearest house. Here’s the image I was presented with when I went to the site just now:

For this one, I’m going to say that the front door of the house is most likely to be just to the left of the driveway, so I dragged the pushpin to about here:

The new location is submitted, and you get shown a new image. What’s the point? Well, if enough people separately agree on the same location for the front door of this house, the new location is used to update local search results in Bing Maps as well as contributing address data to Open Street Maps – crowd-sourced, frontdoor geocoding of properties…

It’s great to see Microsoft continuing to make use of the Open Database Licence and contributing their imagery for use for the benefit of Open Street Maps again (Bing Maps aerial imagery is also available within the PotLatch OSM editor to enable people to trace the location of features and the outlines of building etc.), as well as thinking up innovative uses of the aerial imagery they have available… I wonder what app they might come up with next?