January 14, 2010

Street Maps of Jordan is provided by an Israeli based company!!!

After a long wait and lots of debates we finally entered the civilized Geo world. Thank's to Navteq and of course google maps for providing the service to the Jordanians. Now we can play with maps and build different solutions around it, and of course driving directions.

The delays for not publishing the maps came from some laid back officials whom I am sure they don't think outside their "square meter" were they take the Maps issue as a strategic, or political decision. Well... I was laughing on that but this finding I am talking about is even more funny.

Street Maps of Jordan
( look at the information in the map at the bottom) provided by google maps, were you can navigate for our streets and buildings, is been provided by an Israeli based company called MAPPA GISrael. The leading geographic database and GIS company in Israel.

I am not sure how this happen. How can our geodata been provided by an Israeli company.

The satellite maps can be easily provided by Digital globe or others, but data collection and Geo codding is being built and published by Navteq, while google provide the platform in a very simple to use way. I know they might subcontract a local company to collect the data but how did an Israeli based company collected the information about our streets and buildings?