May – How Google Maps was created

I attended a fascinating talk in Trinity College about Google Maps and mapping our world. The speaker was Ed Parsons from Google London. “I firmly believe technology will improve all of our lives over time,” he told us. The benefit of Google Maps alone, has been calculated to be £300 for every family in the UK.

Maps are used more today than ever in history. The Ordnance Survey in 1801 produced a one-inch scale map of Kent. (This was a coastal area at threat of invasion from France or Spain.) As the name ordnance suggests, the idea was to show what could be a defence against cannons. A wall was classified as “an obstructing feature” until last year. We were also shown six-inch maps of Castleblaney and Londonderry from 1835. Most maps were produced by government agencies for other government agencies, for instance to register land ownership or charts for shipping.

A classic example of a map which is representative instead of truthful is the London Tube map.
Next we saw the internet cable maps – from Ireland to USA; to UK on the way to the EU.
A photo of Tim Berners Lee was shown with his Next Cube on which he invented the basis of the World Wide Web. This computer is in the Science Museum in London, owned by his employer CERN. If a map is stored on a web server, that server can be switched off – but a printed map can be stored.

In 1993 Xerox Parc Map Viewer came out in June, using the Mosaic Browser which had gone live in January. This map was developed by Steve Putz, and was a raster image showing latitude and longitude, viewers could zoom in. The first web map doesn’t exist now, except in a few screenshots. Technology has kept improving so rapidly that old code has been just superseded, often without being stored, but the old map could be re-made.

The first job this produced was digitising postal code boundaries. Maps are now drawn from content in databases. In 1995 / 96 Multimap in the US and Mapquest in the UK were created. The business mode was that they were store locators. AOL bought Mapquest for $1million.

The Wayback Machine stores old versions of sites in an archive. But it only stores HTML to show a homepage, not the maps, because they were in another server. It’s still not showing last year’s maps, which may have been updated.

Web 2.0 created by Tim O’Reilly, is interactive. Google bought Where2 in 2004. This was an Australian firm, and it was the second firm Google bought. This was engineered to serve itself for ads and analytics. At first North America and British Isles only. An employee of Google invented an idea called the Mashup by combining a Google map with a Craigslist listing of rental properties, which showed up as pins. This original version only exists in screenshots now, and at the time he did this, neither Google nor Craigslist knew about it. The map was dynamic as listings changed so the status was ephemeral.

Open Street Map used GPS. They sent a minibus full of people to map a city or the Isle of Wight.

Ed Parsons was the Chief Technology Officer at the Ordnance Survey when Google Earth was launched. Google bought all the satellite imagery and aerial photos, made available to view free of charge, paid for by ads. An image is captured at a point in time. Ed assured us “Storing satellite imagery takes up less room on servers than kittens falling off sofas.”

For Street View, Amazon had a similar project in SF and NY. Cars were used to capture the images. Some of the mapping can show previous dates. Street View is available for most of the inhabited world now, but not as much of Germany due to privacy restrictions. The makers generally had to blur faces, car registrations and so on. Germany had additional requirements; they have to get permission of all the homeowners first, and if required they have to blur the building image. They do not have a database of what the real images show – to comply the raw image has the blur burnt in.

Early mobile phones and early smartphones did not have Global Positioning System - GPS. Bill Clinton signed an order in May 2000 to give GPS from the military for civilian use. However, in 2006 the Nokia N95 cost 700 euros. The GPS would drain its battery in 15 minutes. In 2007 Apple created its iphone. This had no GPS. Steve Jobs did a demo on stage using Google maps to find a Starbucks and order coffee, but it was faked to show potential.

Now, we can get driving information and routes using ambient location – this relates to a knowledge of location that is continually accessible. Google allows people using its phone system to opt-in to anonymously show data streams on how fast traffic is moving; on each street in Dublin, say. How busy is a pub typically at this time? This is told by how many phones are moving. How busy is the next bus coming along? Full but the next one will be empty. People like public transport real time info.

Maps are egocentric. Once the centre of the world map was Jerusalem. Now it’s ‘me’. Ed Parsons assured us we can delete all the info Google stores about us. But if we choose to share, Google can tell us how long our commute will be.

We can investigate contextual fiction. This means downloading a story like Breathe by Kate Pullinger, which draws in content like placenames and weather from where the reader is sitting.

Home assistants also know where we are. An app Home and Away switches house lights on and off via the phone. Nest heating has phone proximity sensors too. These draw on the Internet Of Things (IOT). “The map of the future is no map but a series of devices talking to each other. There is no happy ending. Could be because of the way we interact with information it will be impossible to store archives.” Google says: “We just love measuring everything.”

Q&A
Q: Maps are not entirely true? A: Mapping is getting very objective but personal use is more subjective. Cartography is subjective – you can subtract content to get relevance. If you ask for Chinese restaurants in Dublin Google doesn’t want to show you burger bars. You can switch off the phone, go off grid, explore, choose to be lost. But kids today have confidence that they can turn the phone back on. City planners need to know where people go but even anonymised data is sensitive, so it won’t be sold to third parties.

Q: Mapping developing world cities? A: Map sheet changed every 10 or 15 years – do we really want to update every feature every time it changes. Mapping from Google was originally to help car drivers in California. Most map users in India are on bicycles. In Africa, they are in minibuses. Now countries have new mobile phone systems so excellent signals. These are robust, Chinese made systems.

Q: BBC copied the Domesday Book onto DVD. A: At a conceptual level, these are different things; documents, data. Combination of data and algorithm used for geospatial tools. As a commercial secret the algorithm is not shared. “Largely at this point in time it’s black boxes”.

This was a fascinating, lavishly illustrated talk, and I enjoyed it hugely. The speaker’s love for maps themselves shone through and brought a historical perspective, as well as the technological one we expected. Thanks again to Ed Parsons, Google and the Trinity Long Room Hub.

Speaking of tech, my first SF book Dining Out Around The Solar System will be free to download from Amazon for a few days. Because I don’t put books into a ‘box set’ this means that anyone who buys the full series with one click gets the benefit of the reduction in price. If you have only read the first part of this longer book, now is the time to grab the full length version. May 30 – June 2.

Dining Out Around the Solar System
A Dublin hacker teams up with a London reporter.
The future of journalism… is dangerous.

The books in this series have recently gained some reviews from Jemima Pett, SF and F author.
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