Map Creator

The study of British and Irish roads - their construction, numbering, history, mapping, past and future official roads proposals and general roads musings.

There is a separate forum for Street Furniture (traffic lights, street lights, road signs etc).

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Euan Morrison
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Map Creator

Post by Euan Morrison »

My name is Euan and I work for HERE maps, the mapping division of Nokia. I am involved in the maintenance of the HERE digital map of the UK. We’ve been building digital maps for years and provide the maps that power most of the worlds navigation devices - maps that are used by real people in the real world, more than 100 million times a day. Our map making is routed in the automobile industry and provide the maps for almost all of the in car navigation systems.

We are entering a new era of map development and we’d like to invite SABRE forum members to embark on a new and exciting journey with us, one in which communities of experts provide meaningful input, share their local knowledge and insights and contribute to our maps overall using our Map Creator tool on HERE: http://here.com/mapcreator

The Map Creator tool is now live, it provides an avenue for all road enthusiasts to ensure real world changes are on the map, from the major highways right down to the local cycle paths and pedestrian walkways. The changes you make will be shared with millions of other users, making a real difference to how they experience HERE maps.

There are many other aspects to the Map Creator tool. If you would like to learn more and would be interested in making map edits then please email me: euan.morrison@here.com and I can arrange to set you up with write access.

Best regards,
Euan Morrison

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HERE Maps
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Lockwood
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Lockwood »

Quite offtopic, but...

Could you please make HERE Maps for Windows Phone save the maps to the SD Card and not the internal storage?
For entry level phones with 4GB storage, and the notorious "Other Files" dead space, the map data is crippling.
It's certainly a better offering that Bing Maps (That put me on the M6 Toll when I was in the woods next to the A3(M))
Euan Morrison
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Euan Morrison »

Lockwood wrote:Quite offtopic, but...

Could you please make HERE Maps for Windows Phone save the maps to the SD Card and not the internal storage?
For entry level phones with 4GB storage, and the notorious "Other Files" dead space, the map data is crippling.
It's certainly a better offering that Bing Maps (That put me on the M6 Toll when I was in the woods next to the A3(M))
Thanks for your feedback, Lockwood - I will forward your suggestion on within our internal company structure.
Euan.
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c2R
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Re: Map Creator

Post by c2R »

It's all very nice, but I'd rather contribute my data to Openstreetmap....
Is there a road improvement project going on near you? Help us to document it on the SABRE Wiki - help is available in the Digest forum.
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Ritchie333
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Ritchie333 »

c2R wrote:It's all very nice, but I'd rather contribute my data to Openstreetmap....
Agreed. OpenStreetMap is much faster and has far more detail - it has all the footpaths around Ashford properly marked and annotated, for instance. Which is why "Maps" on the top yellow menu is based around it. :D Surely it would be easier to just to take this existing free data published under an open licence and reuse it instead of inviting people to reinvent the wheel?
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drm567
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Re: Map Creator

Post by drm567 »

And the colours used for roads are even worse (if that's possible!) than Google.

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c2R
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Re: Map Creator

Post by c2R »

Ritchie333 wrote:
c2R wrote:It's all very nice, but I'd rather contribute my data to Openstreetmap....
Agreed. OpenStreetMap is much faster and has far more detail - it has all the footpaths around Ashford properly marked and annotated, for instance. Which is why "Maps" on the top yellow menu is based around it. :D Surely it would be easier to just to take this existing free data published under an open licence and reuse it instead of inviting people to reinvent the wheel?
More interesting because Microsoft "support" OSM via their provision of imagery; and own Nokia now... left and right hands?
Is there a road improvement project going on near you? Help us to document it on the SABRE Wiki - help is available in the Digest forum.
Have you browsed SABRE Maps recently? Get involved! - see our guide to scanning and stitching maps
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Richard_Fairhurst
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Richard_Fairhurst »

Microsoft didn't buy the mapping bit of Nokia (HERE), only the mobile phones bit.
drm567 wrote:And the colours used for roads are even worse (if that's possible!) than Google.
OpenStreetMap is a lot more than openstreetmap.org, of course; there are hundreds of different styles using the same data. MapQuest Open is a fairly traditional road-centric view of things, also available via the layer switcher on osm.org.
Help map the world: openstreetmap.org
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Mark Hewitt
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Mark Hewitt »

One thing and it's the most important thing PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE for the love of whatever deity you may choose to worship or not. USE THE STANDARD UK COLOURS, that is those which are used in the Ordnance Survey Landranger 1:50,000 mapping i.e. blue for motorways, green for primary, red for non-primary, orange for B-roads, yellow for connecting roads etc.

These are the standard UK colours, they are not a matter of debate or stylistic concerns, they are the standard, and as such make reading UK maps far easier than some random colours someone in the design department things look good or consistent.

Take a lesson from how Google have flushed their maps offering down the toilet, stand out by making your maps useful!

At the moment you have deep purple for motorways, light purple for primary roads, washed out yellow for non-primary and for B-roads, it looks terrible and makes no sense.
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Chris5156
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Chris5156 »

Mark Hewitt wrote:At the moment you have deep purple for motorways, light purple for primary roads, washed out yellow for non-primary and for B-roads, it looks terrible and makes no sense.
Hadn't looked at the here.com maps until you wrote this. Wow, what a selection of colours - it's like a perfectly nice map has been coloured in by the sugar plum fairy.

Why purples and yellows? Not helpful. I agree with Mark's point - use appropriate colours for the country you are depicting. In France they will expect red autoroutes and routes nationales. In the UK we expect blue motorways and green primary routes. Choosing something else is just wilful disregard of something that will make your maps intuitive to users.
Brock
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Brock »

Mark Hewitt wrote:One thing and it's the most important thing PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE for the love of whatever deity you may choose to worship or not. USE THE STANDARD UK COLOURS, that is those which are used in the Ordnance Survey Landranger 1:50,000 mapping i.e. blue for motorways, green for primary, red for non-primary, orange for B-roads, yellow for connecting roads etc.
All the non-OS maps I've got use yellow for B-roads and white for unclassified roads.

How did red become the standard for non-primary A-roads anyway? (I mentioned before that it might be more logical to have red signs to match the mapping conventions.) Was it just the primary colour that happened to be left over?
Chris5156 wrote: Why purples and yellows? Not helpful. I agree with Mark's point - use appropriate colours for the country you are depicting.
I presume the intention was to standardize the colours across all countries, but I agree that the choice is rather strange.
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J--M--B
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Re: Map Creator

Post by J--M--B »

Mark Hewitt wrote:One thing and it's the most important thing PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE for the love of whatever deity you may choose to worship or not. USE THE STANDARD UK COLOURS, that is those which are used in the Ordnance Survey Landranger 1:50,000 mapping i.e. blue for motorways, green for primary, red for non-primary, orange for B-roads, yellow for connecting roads etc. .....
Difficult when maps are being produced for many countries though it should be possible to set roads to particular types then let the user choose the colour scheme they want.
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Mark Hewitt
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Mark Hewitt »

Brock wrote: I presume the intention was to standardize the colours across all countries, but I agree that the choice is rather strange.
A point I made in relation to the google mapping thing is that standards across countries may on the face of it seem helpful, but they are not. Mostly because the vast majority of people looking at maps of the UK, will be from the UK. Same with France, Germany whereever. So having standard colours across all countries is only useful for a handful of people. Whereas having the standard colours residents are used to helps the vast majority of users.

In any case it only means a small number of people need to learn a different colour set for a different country, as opposed to ALL users having to learn a non standard colour set.
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Chris5156
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Chris5156 »

Brock wrote:How did red become the standard for non-primary A-roads anyway? (I mentioned before that it might be more logical to have red signs to match the mapping conventions.) Was it just the primary colour that happened to be left over?
Red was the obvious choice for the most important roads - so until the early 1960s, red was the colour of A-roads. When motorways were introduced, many maps showed them in red too, but it didn't distinguish them enough from ordinary roads, so blue became normal. When primary routes were introduced, the signs were green, so naturally they turned green.

Non-primary A-roads are effectively a colour that has twice been overtaken by having more important classes of roads created more recently. They were, pre-motorway, the top tier of the road hierarchy!
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michael769
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Re: Map Creator

Post by michael769 »

The OS only started to use green relatively recently. I still have a 1992 vintage 1:50 000 that used red for all A routes.
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nowster
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Re: Map Creator

Post by nowster »

michael769 wrote:The OS only started to use green relatively recently. I still have a 1992 vintage 1:50 000 that used red for all A routes.
And a (T) suffix for trunk routes...
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Stevie D
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Stevie D »

Brock wrote:How did red become the standard for non-primary A-roads anyway? (I mentioned before that it might be more logical to have red signs to match the mapping conventions.) Was it just the primary colour that happened to be left over?
Red was the standard colour for A roads from the year dot, long before there was any suggestion of matching map colours to sign colours. The 'ten mile' series did latterly use different colours to denote trunk roads. It was not until after Warboys that different colours were used to denote motorway and primary route signs and these gradually made their way onto maps, although not all mappers use these (Michélin, for example, still just use red, yellow and white, the same as they always have done, in all countries).
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Stevie D
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Re: Map Creator

Post by Stevie D »

J--M--B wrote:Difficult when maps are being produced for many countries though it should be possible to set roads to particular types then let the user choose the colour scheme they want.
Why? Just use whatever is standard for those countries. Google used to do that - the UK had different colours from elsewhere, and it didn't cause problems. They manage different route markers for different countries, so there's no reason why they can't do roads as well.
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owen b
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Re: Map Creator

Post by owen b »

michael769 wrote:The OS only started to use green relatively recently. I still have a 1992 vintage 1:50 000 that used red for all A routes.
I'm surprised that the OS still doesn't use green for primary roads on their 1:25,000 maps.
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nowster
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Re: Map Creator

Post by nowster »

Stevie D wrote:Red was the standard colour for A roads from the year dot...
In fact they were coloured red before there were A roads.
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