Category: Industry

Paper Maps: New Business, Lost Loves

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

GIS analyst and cartographer Andrew Middleton moved across the country to become the new owner of the Map Center, a Rhode Island map store, after the previous owner announced that he was looking for someone to give the store away to. In an interview with GeoHipster’s Randal Hale, Andrew outlines what he sees as the state of the market for paper maps: the antique map business is pretty healthy; what he’s interested in is contemporary cartography.

The bigger and more mysterious question for me is: Can I build a store off of something that focuses on contemporary cartography and do it in a physical location? Some people more talented than I have been able to pull it off selling their own work online. Only a couple of people in the U.S. are doing it in a physical space with overhead. With rent. I like knowing that there are places like the Map Center still around and I want to be a part of keeping Rhode Island quirky and worth exploring. But it’s not 1995 any more. I sell gas station 8-folds and prints of USGS topo maps and guide books and trail maps but it’s hard to sell information that someone on the internet is giving away for free. The value add of a paper map is providing that information in a portable, digestible and familiar way that includes context and that does have value. Lots of folks buy paper maps for outdoor activities, trip planning and conceptualizing space in large areas or putting on their walls to remind them off a place they love or a place they want to explore.

He’s looking for maps to sell: see the Map Center’s call for cartographers. As for the kind of customer Andrew is looking for, it would probably look a lot like Mary Ann Sternberg, who in a piece for Next Avenue writes about her history with and love of paper maps.

The Lost Art of Map Reading

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“The physical map has the same appeal, probably, as the vinyl record. It’s tactile, it’s there, it’s present—it’s not ephemeral.”

A nice piece from CBC News on the so-called lost art of map reading and paper maps, touching many of the usual points, featuring (among others) the co-owners of my local map store, Ottawa’s World of Maps.

The Return of Paper Maps, Again

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Every so often we see a story about how paper maps are making a comeback. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that sales of paper maps have been going up in recent years—a story that NBC’s Today show picked up yesterday. One of the appeals of paper maps, these stories note, is that they provide context—the “bigger picture,” as the WSJ article puts it. Something that can be lost when focusing on getting to the destination.

I’m not remotely surprised that paper maps refuse to go away, that they keep showing signs of renewed life. I have a thought or two about this, and about the perennial question of paper maps in the digital age. There’s a reason this question keeps coming up—which these stories do get at. It’s that every new technology that supplants the old does so imperfectly and incompletely.

Continue reading “The Return of Paper Maps, Again” →

The Rationale Behind Overture

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A couple of links regarding the Overture Map Foundation announcement (previously) afford some context and background. James Killick chalks up the decision to launch Overture to a combination of needs to control costs and maintain control while ensuring interoperability: “the reasons for the birth of OMF seem to be valid and defensible.” Meanwhile, the Geomob Podcast interviews geospatial veteran Marc Prioleau, in which (among other things) Marc observes that the companies behind Overture (including Meta, where he’s currently at) and OpenStreetMap are not on the same page: OSM’s focus does not serve the companies’ needs, and changing that focus would harm the OSM community. (Since “why not just use OpenStreetMap?” is a recurring question.)

Update, 3 Feb 2023: Tom Tom is running with Killick’s take.

The Overture Map Foundation

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Announced earlier this month, the Overture Map Foundation is an initiative founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta (i.e. Facebook), Microsoft and TomTom to build an ecosystem of interoperable open map data—an ecosystem, note, that does not at the moment include Apple, Esri or Google, so presumably this is a way for smaller owners of map data (at least for TomTom values of smaller) to form Voltron punch above their weight by making it easier to combine and share resources. From the press release:

Multiple datasets reference the same real-world entities using their own conventions and vocabulary, which can make them difficult to combine. Map data is vulnerable to errors and inconsistencies. Open map data can also lack the structure needed to easily build commercial map products and services on top.

Making it easier to combine data—one of Overture’s aims is to create “a common, structured, and documented data schema”—sounds an awful lot like a way to address James Killick’s complaint about the geospatial industry’s lack of common data standards (previously). It also sounds like TomTom’s map platform, announced last month, is part of something bigger.

Given the talk about open map data, it’s not surprising that the OpenStreetMap team has some thoughts about the announcement, and about how Overture and OSM might work together in the future.

‘Geospatial Data Is Stuck in the Year 1955’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

James Killick’s blog, Map Happenings, looks very much like one worth following. Killick’s been around the block more than a few times, working at Mapquest, Esri and most recently at Apple’s Maps division. He’s seen things, in other words. In his latest post, he decries the geospatial industry’s lack of common data standards, which he compares to the shipping industry before container ships.

The lack of common, broadly adopted geospatial data exchange standards is crippling the geospatial industry. It’s a bit like going to an EV charger with your shiny new electric vehicle and discovering you can’t charge it because your car has a different connector to the one used by the EV charger. The electricity is there and ready to be sucked up and used, but, sorry—your vehicle can’t consume it unless you miraculously come up with a magical adaptor that allows the energy to flow.

James produces a couple of counterexamples—standards for transit data and indoor mapping developed by Google and Apple, respectively—and points to Esri as a possible force for data standardization.

Previously: Immersive View and the Death of Consumer Maps.

The TomTom Maps Platform

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

TomTom corporate logoEarlier this month, at its investor meeting, TomTom announced that it was launching something called the TomTom Maps Platform. The announcement was, because of where it was made, long on investor-focused jargon: growth, innovation, etc., so it’s not immediately clear what it will mean.

Basically, TomTom is building a map ecosystem that can be built on by developers and businesses: an apparent shot across the bow at the Google Maps ecosystem. And indeed that’s how The Next Web sees it: an attempt to “wrestle control” of digital mapping away from Silicon Valley.

TomTom plans to do so by combining map data from its own data, third-party sources, sensor data, and OpenStreetMap. I’ve been around long enough to know that combining disparate map data sources is neither trivial nor easy. It’s also very labour intensive. TomTom says they’ll be using AI and machine learning to automate that process. It’ll be a real accomplishment if they can make it work. It may actually be a very big deal. I suspect it may also be the only way to make this platform remotely any good and financially viable at the same time.

Esri Pays $2.3 Million in Back Wages to Resolve Pay Discrimination Case

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Esri has agreed to pay $2.3 million in back wages and will review its compensation system and provide training as part of a conciliation agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor, the department announced yesterday. The case dates to 2017, when, in the course of a federal compliance evaluation, the department alleged that Esri engaged in systemic pay discrimination, paying 176 female employees less than their male counterparts. Esri entered into the conciliation agreement voluntarily.

Union Accuses Mapbox of Retaliation

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

I don’t think the Mapbox unionization story is over. Last week the Mapbox Workers Union accused Mapbox of retaliating against union organizers, several of whom, they say, have been abruptly fired. Retaliation is against U.S. labour law, and they’re filing unfair labour practice charges in that vein.

Previously: Mapbox Union Drive Fails; Mapbox Employees Trying to Unionize.

Esri’s New Giant Globe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“When you are a global Geographic Information Technology company with a globe in your logo, you don’t shy away from the opportunity to have a great big glorious 8.5-foot diameter illuminated rotating globe in your new office building. But what sort of globe cartography do you design? How should this gigantic model of our lovely home planet appear?” John Nelson and Sean Breyer explain the design and construction process behind Esri’s new globe—a custom Earthball manufactured by Orbis World Globes.

The Mother of Landsat

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Virginia Tower Northwood is sometimes called “the mother of Landsat” for her invention of the multispectral scanner that was launched aboard Landsat 1. An alumna of MIT, she is the subject of this long profile by Alice Dragoon in the MIT Technology Review, which looks her entire career, which prior to Landsat involved radar and antenna design—including, notably, the transmitter on the Surveyor 1 lunar lander. See also this profile on NASA’s Landsat Science page.

Mapbox Employees Trying to Unionize

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Bloomberg: “Employees at Mapbox Inc., which makes mapping tools used by Instacart Inc. and Snap Inc., have announced their intention to unionize, making them the latest group of tech workers to embrace organized labor in a traditionally nonunion industry.” Two-thirds of Mapbox’s 222 U.S. employees have signed union cards; in an internal statement Monday, Mapbox declined to voluntarily recognize the Mapbox Workers Union—which presumably means that there will be a government-supervised vote on whether to unionize.