Mike Loukides in Apple’s maps: Apple’s maps problem isn’t about software or design. It’s about data nails the problem with Apple Maps. It’s the data stupid!
Here’s the difficulty. As Stephen O’Grady has pointed out, the problem with maps is really a data problem, not a software or design problem. If Apple’s maps app was ugly or had a poor user interface, it would be fixed within a month. But Apple is really looking at a data problem: bad data, incomplete data, conflicting data, poor quality data, incorrectly formatted data. Anyone who works with data understands that 80% of the work in any data product is getting your data into good enough shape so that it’s useable. Google is a data company, and they understand this; hence the reports of more than 7,000 people working on Google Maps. And even Google Maps has its errors; I just reported a “road” that is really just a poorly maintained trail.
Mike’s post is amusing and informative so be sure to read it.
But remember these two points:
- Data is always dirty, syntactically and/or semantically. “Big data” is “big dirty data.”
- Google has 7,000 people, not servers, clusters, algorithms, etc., working on Google Maps. (Is that evidence that “big dirty data” requires human correction?)
The bigger the data, the more dirt you will encounter.
Is your data application going to be the next “Apple Maps?”
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