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Satnav manufacturer TomTom has written an article strongly criticising cartographical open data projects like OpenStreetMap for their "accuracy and reliability". "Open source mapping has really come into the limelight in the past few years, and many businesses have started to experiment with its use in industry," says TomTom on its website. "The limelight, however, brings with it closer scrutiny, and recent reports on the accuracy and reliability of open source maps make for uncomfortable reading."
It claims that open mappng data has both less coverage, and is "wide open" to attack from vandals. The article quotes a study reporting that an open source map had a third less residential road coverage and 16 percent less basic map attributes such as street names. "Worse still," the article reads, "it blended pedestrian and car map geometry, and included 'a high number of fields and forest trails' classified as roads."
Unfortunately TomTom fails to cite the author or title of the study. We've reached out to the company to find out what paper it's referring to, but we hadn't recieved a reply at the time of publication. In the meantime, Pascal Neis from the University of Heidelberg believes that it's his study published in Future Internet in December 2011, which compares TomTom data to OpenStreetMap and also reads: "This discrepancy should disappear by the middle or end of 2012, and the OSM dataset for Germany should then feature a comparative route network for cars as provided by TomTom".
The article also claims that open mapping data is vulnerable to attack from vandals. It cites an incident (again, unattributed) where a leading provider of open-source mapping data suffered 100,000 individual attacks, including reversals of the recorded directions on one-way streets. Richard Fairhurst, an OpenStreetMap consultant, identifies this event as when OpenStreetMap claimed Google contractors were vandalising its maps. "This is plain wrong," says Fairhurst. "Not all of those '102,000 hits' were 'attacks'. In fact, no more than a couple of dozen were -- and those were swiftly spotted, and fixed, by the OpenStreetMap community."
TomTom concludes: "Open source mapping certainly has its benefits and can be extremely useful, particularly for pedestrians and in city or town centres. The way that the maps incorporate input from a wide community of contributors can result in impressive international coverage, whilst also driving down costs of production. However, when it comes to automotive-grade mapping, open source has some quite serious limitations, falling short on the levels of accuracy and reliability required for safe navigation."
Fairhurst counters: "You can tell you've got your competitors rattled when they start producing knocking copy about you."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
