Posts tagged as "geoblr"

In India Just Because You Can Map Something, Doesn't Always Mean You Should

It's easy to get stuck in a mental rut, to think that everyone thinks and feels the same way you do about a subject. But sometimes you need to get away and visit another country and another culture to find out that maybe there's more than one way of looking at a subject. For me that subject is, unsurprisingly, maps and the other country was India.

Some countries are easier to map than others. Up to the end of the Cold War, it was commonplace for the UK's Ordnance Survey to not show prohibited places, although this practice has been effectively stopped due to the widespread availability of satellite imagery. Further afield, there's contested borders and territorial disputes which makes mapping some administrative boundaries something of a challenge; a proof of the old adage about pleasing some people some of the time but not all people all of the time.

It's easy to think that not mapping an area is a thing of the past. That we can and should map everywhere. That mapping is simply the combination of human effort, a bit of technology and a lot of data. Indeed OpenStreetMap's beginner's guide states upfront that the data you add improves the free world map for everyone. But as I found out, in India, there's a lot more subtlety and nuance behind this admirable creed.

Firstly there's the act of mapping itself. As with pre-Cold War Britain (and to be fair, some parts of Britain today), India has placed restrictions on what can and cannot appear on a map. When working for Nokia's HERE Maps, I ran a program to use crowd mapping to improve the company's maps in India and came across these restrictions first hand. My point here is not to agree or disagree with a government's stance on mapping restrictions but merely to point out that they exist.