Google e Mapas na India

Post do O’Reilly Radar mostra como o Google está usando a cooperação, com distribuição de kits com GPS, para construir mapas mais detalhados da Índia. Segundo o post o mapa é de propriedade do Google, diferentemente do Projeto Open Street Map, livre e comunitário, um “free wiki world map”.

Vejam detalhes:

“Google has been sending GPS kits to India that enable locals to make more detailed maps of their area. After the data has been uploaded and then verified against other participant’s data it becomes a part of the map. The process is very reminiscent of what Open Street Map, the community map-building project, has been doing. The biggest difference is that the data (to my knowledge) is owned by Google and is not freely available back to the community like it is with OSM.
(…)
Now, everything you see here was created by people in Hyderabad. We have a pilot program running in India. We’ve done about 50 cities now, in their completeness, with driving directions and everything – completely done by having locals use some software we haven’t released publicly to draw their city on top of our photo imagery.”