BARCELONA, Spain Calling Google's mission "organizing the world's information," a company executive told the Mobile World Congress here that mapping is an integral part of the company's mobile initiative.
For new location services to succeed on the mobile Internet, they must meet three key requirements, he added. Maps need to be comprehensive, they need to be combined with multiple sources of data and they must be open.
Gummi Hafsteinsson, senior product manager at Google's mobile division, cited the London cholera outbreak of 1854 as an example. John Snow, a British physician, documented his argument that cholera had spread via contaminated water when he plotted the location of deaths related to cholera on the streets of London.
Snow found a higher concentration of the disease in neighborhoods supplied by a company that drew its water from a Thames River downstream location. Snow discovered 500 deaths occurred within 10 days in one particular location. Snow's study is believed to have demonstrated the power of spatial analysis and established mapping as a standard research approach in medical geography and epidemiology.
"We've learned three things from this," said Google's Hafsteinsson. First, maps require a comprehensive set of data. Just as Google's search engine can't work correctly without access to all Web pages, Hafsteinsson said location services require a comprehensive set of location-related information. "Imagine you found on a map a restaurant that you want to go to, but once you arrive, there is no restaurant. You lose faith in that map and in that device immediately."
Comprehensive, location-based information used by consumers could be very diverse. Who will provide it? "We want to make everyone Dr. Snow. We want everyone to feed information back onto map," Hafsteinsson responded.
Second, maps require "juxtaposition of data," according to Hafsteinsson. "We need more than one layer of information" to make the information useful, he added. "It's just as Dr. Snow used a multiple layers of information to prove his case on the epidemic." Google also expects users to contribute new layers of information, including tips, reviews and pictures of a specific location or its surroundings, for example.
Third, and perhaps most important, is "openness." The need for many users to publish location-related information requires "an interoperable system, to which everyone can get access." There must be a way for data to interact. "Nobody should get locked out of this," said Hafsteinsson.