Making your Mark… on Google Maps
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011
Google Maps has long been one our favorite tools over here in CELT. Google maps is great for a lot of reasons, but especially when it comes to creating personalized maps with landmarks and boundaries. To add to an already stellar online tool, Google just released a crowdsourcing portal for Google Maps called Mapmaker.
For those of you unfamiliar with crowdsourcing, the idea is simple. Take any project that’s made up of repeating several small, simple tasks thousands of times. Any project like this is likely to be too large for a single person to complete in a life time. Now, instead of trying to do all of that work yourself, invite others to contribute (as much or as little as they want) to your project. Add in a measure of review and oversight, and distribute the task through a website to the whole world. Ta-Da, you’re crowdsourcing (here are some examples of how crowdsourcing is changing the web).
Google Mapmaker takes this very idea, and applies it to the processing of making maps. Anyone on the web is invited to contribute to the mapping process – marking roads, landmarks, businesses, buildings, campuses, you name it. Each contributor’s edits are submitted for peer review, and provided that they’re approved they end up as searchable entries on Google Maps.
Here’s a quick look at the process of marking a building:
After logging in to Mapmaker you draw the outline a building:
Fill in extra information about the building:
And then click on save.
Once you’ve submitted your edit to Google Maps you can track the progress of your edits from pending review to published.
Once your edits have been reviewed by others out on the web, your changes will go live to Google Maps.
