Big Dog Geo-Google Five Million Miles and Growing

11 SEPTEMBER 2012

Google Ground Truth Projects

"We decided to start a project called Ground Truth, and this was really to build our own maps from scratch. We would start with licensed data and we would find whatever we could where we could get full rights to the data and improve it from there"

(Image from BBC News )

Ground Truth using Google own StreetView to attribute roads with street names and other locality information.

Ground Truth 1.0
The following countries are covered by the first stage of Google's Ground Truth map data project:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Lesotho, Luxembourg, Macau, Mexico, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US and Vatican City.

Ground Truth 2.0
So far the Ground Truth project covers 31 nations - places where there was already decent data Google could license to use as the foundations for its process.

Now it is about to embark on what it calls Ground Truth 2.0, extending the system to "more difficult" regions.

Beyond Ground Truth
Google also aims to improve its service by mapping the interiors of more buildings - the current emphasis is on transport hubs, shopping centres, museums and business that pay for an approved photographer to visit them.

"The benefits of having Street View can't be under-counted," Brian McClendon says.
"We have over 20 petabytes [21.5 billion megabytes] of imagery and have driven and published over five million miles of Street View roads."

Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19536269