Ground Truth: Behind the Scenes of the Intricate Google Maps System
By emeadows
September 13, 2012
September 13, 2012
- The Atlantic got a behind-the-scenes look at Google’s “Ground Truth” system, which is responsible for the creation and sustaining of its intricate Google Maps.
- These maps are widely used within today’s mobile infrastructure. “Where you’re searching from has become almost as important as what you’re searching for,” writes The Atlantic.
- Google realizes this and continues to expand its mobile reach, with an ongoing and tight focus on maps.
- Former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who works on Google Maps, said of the creation process: “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.”
- The truly impressive aspect of Google Maps is that “humans are coding every bit of the logic of the road onto a representation of the world so that computers can simply duplicate (infinitely, instantly) the judgments that a person already made,” explains the article.
- “I came away convinced that the geographic data Google has assembled is not likely to be matched by any other company,” writes Alexis C. Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic. “The secret to this success isn’t, as you might expect, Google’s facility with data, but rather its willingness to commit humans to combining and cleaning data about the physical world.”
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