[gps-talkusers] Re: TOTAL INADEQUACY OF UK MAPS

Hello Steve,

I apologize for the state of the maps for the UK, we had a few people involved in testing the UK maps before we released them and I though they were adequate. We spent a lot of work in this area last year and improved the UK maps quite a lot during the 2004 release of the UK maps. For the 2005 UK maps we had a few issues due to changes in the map format from our map company and I though we resolved all of them. It seems as you pointed out that we have not addressed all issues. It is hard for us not living there to really understand the issues of address lookup and we rely heavily on our alpha and beta testers to tell us when we don't have it quite right. We may have to beef up our beta testers in Europe, we will look into this for future European releases. We understand postal code geo-coding would be very helpful and it is on our list of future improvements, but that one feature is a multi man-month project. We will work on continuing to improve address lookup as we move forward.

As for the POI situation we are still looking into licensing a more extensive database for our European users, and will keep you posted on any developments. If any of you know a company who collects this kind of data for the UK please pass this along to us.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Charles LaPierre CTO
SenderoGroup

At 12:07 PM 7/5/2006, you wrote: 
Hi everybody

Many apologies to the majority of you on this list who are US residents and seem to be enjoying some success with the Sendero product.

Unfortunately, the UK maps are not very good. Firstly we have very few POIS and those we have are pretty useless being mainly filling stations, banks (OK they are useful sometimes), car hire offices and restaurants/takeaways you would not want to visit. Useful items such as railway stations, bust stations are there none.

POIs apart the maps suffer from dreadful inconsistencies that mean that you have to have a full knowledge of local government boundaries in order to find anything. This would not be so bad if it were consistent but in some areas a massive area is covered by one administrative district and in others you need to know the parish names.

I recently visited Chippenham, a market town of approximately 70,000 population. I could not find it on the maps. When we arrived I discovered that it was listed as North Wiltshire, Chippenham. I did not know that North Wiltshire was an administrative area. Today I have been trying to plan a local journey of about four miles from a local railway station to an office block. The town is Wokingham a subdivision of Bracknell Forest District, but on the maps there are three Wokingham's listed Wokingham, England, Wokingham, Barkham and Wokingham Without. The station is unsurprisingly on Station Road. Station Road is not listed under any of the Wokinghams.

Come on Sendero its time to get your act together and start improving the maps for other countries. You have several UK customers and we deserve better than this.

A lot of the problems could be solved if, like most other computerised maps, we could enter postcodes and find our destinations, POIs and virtual positions.

Steve Bingham
Rapidly becoming disillusioned with the system.


Charles M. La Pierre CTO
Sendero Group, LLC

Lat. 37 15' 25" N  Lon: 121 53' 04" W



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