Ground Truth

Two 'Ground Truth' stories September 2012 - September 2014

Google Maps rolls out Map Maker & Report a Problem features to Taiwan, Russia and Malaysia

In a blog post today detailing its Ground Truth data collection program for Google Maps, Google announced some new features rolling out to users in Taiwan, Russia and Malaysia. As part of the Ground Truth program rolling out to 5 new countries today, Google is also making its Google Map Maker and Report a Problem features available for users in Taiwan, Russia, and Malaysia to contribute:

Today, we’ve reached our 50th Ground Truth country with the addition of five new countries: Taiwan, Malaysia, Poland, Romania, and the last regions of Russia. We’re also rolling out Google Map Maker and Report a Problem—our crowdsourcing map tools—to Taiwan, Russia and Malaysia, giving anyone in those locations the ability to share and contribute their local knowledge directly to Google Maps.

Google also notes that it will be publishing more articles over the next week sharing more details of how its Ground Truth program and Map Maker work to let others contribute to improving Google Maps.

A look at how Google builds accurate maps with ‘Ground Truth’ data

Google’s map offerings build in the human intelligence on the front end, and that’s what allows its computers to tell you the best route from San Francisco to Boston.

In an exclusive story by the Senior Editor at The Atlantic, Alexis C. Madrigal, Google for the first time gives us a look at “Ground Truth”. It is a project described by Madrigal as a secretive, complex internal map that contains data, such as “no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions,” necessary to help users navigate through Google Maps:

I was slated to meet with Gupta and the engineering ringleader on his team, former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who’d spent his 20 percent time working on Google Mars, and Nick Volmar, an “operator” who actually massages map data.

“So you want to make a map,” Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.”

Describing Ground Truth to be an elaborate internal Map Maker of sorts, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is just how much human input goes into making the Google Maps experience accurate. In the story, Madrigal noted the Ground Truth Geo team aims to address most of the fixable problems reported by users (thousands daily) within minutes:
Expand
Expanding
Close