They pushed the update out on Jan 7. By Feb 22, it hadn't been completed. Something is not right with this explanation. Doesn't matter how low a priority it was, it should have been pushed out within in what? Two weeks?, a month?

Your kids/grandkids/greatgrandkids (as appropriate) will not know what it feels like to be lost. Think about that. The notion of being lost is a universal human feeling not quite like any other feeling. We've all been lost, regardless of our navigation skills. The next generation won't ever be lost. They won't experience that feeling. They may be in unfamiliar territory, but they will know where they are.

There are a limited number of sources for the data that is "what street address is at what latitude/longitude?" which is technically "reverse geocoding". They are:
a) The government
b) Private companies who spend lots of $$ gathering the data

In the U.S, the government sources are:
a) The TIGER database - this is not good enough for the task, but it's free
b) Local city/township and county governments - this is the very best data when it exists, but it doesn't exist in lots of places, and it's hard to get in many places where it does exist
c) The 9-1-1 system often has their own source of address data which is used to figure out where you are when you call from a mobile phone

In the U.S. the private sources are:
a) Navteq
b) Tele Atlas

All of the other places that seem to have data actually get it from the above sources one way or another. Sometimes, they have auxiliary data like satellite images or street level images, but the database that links street addresses to geocoordinates comes from one of the above sources. Note that Navteq and Tele Atlas try to get the local city/county data when they can. When they can't they "drive" streets with a GPS equipped vehicle, clicking on houses and other buildings as they go. The 9-1-1 system does the same. The city/county data is actual map data, with polygons for streets, parcels, etc. It's often hard to get address data from it without additional work because the city/county data is developed for land use planning and tax revenue and not reverse geocoding.

The local data probably ought to be freely available, and it's the most accurate, although often somewhat incomplete source of data. Trying to get free access to TeleAtlas and Navteq data is not going to work, which means getting it from Google, Twitter, etc is not going to work.

Other countries have different situations. As noted above, the U.K. mapping data is available, and is excellent quality.

One good story deserves another, from several years ago

There was this medical device manufacturer. It had an older product, pre-microprocessor. One day, the FDA came for an inspection. When they do that, they usually send at least one person with clue, but they cross train other people and send them too. On this inspection, one of the inspector's regular job was inspecting galleys in ships (another FDA function you may not know about). This guy had been cross trained.

So, they are walking down the manufacturing line, and the employee shows them the board from the product. One of the chips has a label on on. The inspector says "PROM"? Meaning, is that chip a programmable read only memory (like today's flash, but usually one time programmable and a lot smaller). The employee says "Yes, that's a PROM". The inspector says "Checksum?" and the employee says "yes, the checksum is on the label". The inspector says "Verify?" and the employee takes the board, pulls the chip, goes over to the programmer, plugs it in and verifies that the checksum is valid.

The inspector says "Source Code?". The employee is a bit stumped. He goes away to ask some engineers who were around for a while, then goes to the manufacturing engineering guys and finally goes back to the inspector and asks them to accompany him to a storage room.

In the storage room, there are a number of 4 drawer file cabinets. The employee searches around, and finally finds the right file.

The file has the right build data on the cover. He opens the file and triumphantly removes the floppy disk with the source code on it.

An 8" floppy disk.

You know what's coming right?








No 8" drive left in the company.

Increasingly, there is good data from local government. Both TeleAtlas and Navteq try to get this data. Not all governments make it available on reasonable terms. In some states, there is an organized effort to create good maps of the entire state. There is also some effort to coalesce mapping collection within government. Often there are four or five independently developed maps. A county may have a GIS department, your local town or city may have one, your local 9-1-1 PSAP has one, and often there is a state map. While today, they all are independent, with different "base maps", we do see some changes where there is sharing of map data among the government entities. The ideal is that local government has a single, accurate, up to date map, which feeds both state-wide maps, and is made available to the commercial companyies who depend on good map data. I work on the 9-1-1 system, and I can tell you that, for example, if the local utilities used the same base map as the PSAP, things would be A LOT better, and the utility crews could probably provide another great source of error checking, updates and additional information that would benefit other map users. It could be win-win: local government provides the base map and a set of public layers, which is given at low cost to commercial enterprises so long as they contribute errors, updates and layers appropriate for the government to have.