Back in March of 2008 I discovered that Google Maps was incorrectly displaying the official title of the National Museum of the American Indian on their maps. They had truncated the word museum to MSM. A friend of mine who works at Navteq, the supplier of the data, confirmed that the length of the title was too long, so they shaved off a few characters by truncating the word museum to msm. This lexical error was eventually corrected on Google Maps….
However, last night I had someone in India do a Yahoo! search for National Msm of the American Indian and ended up visiting my page. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that Yahoo! Maps was also doing the same type of truncation with Navteq’s data. I think NavTeq should to change it’s dataset so all the museums names are spelled correctly.
Note: the links in the images in this entry go to the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden because it was the closest result for my query “National Msm of the American Indian”
Is this a case of where everyone kisses the same person and then finds out that person has the cold? :)
In OpenStreetMap there is a mantra, “Don’t Tag for the Renderer”. Meaning, don’t set attributes or names trying to assume what will appear a specific way in a specific cartographic rendering. This instead should be the work of the renderer to decide appropriate layout, font size, wrapping, and catenation of words.
It is interesting what more public interest and awareness of cartographic renderings will do to raise the expected quality. ‘Professional’ geospatial vendors are going to soon have to play catch-up with the public and ‘amateur’ cartographers (see OpenCycleMap).
Comment by Andrew Turner — 8/14/2009 @ 7:32 am