Jonathan Crowe on TomTom’s Mapping Platform
Jonathan Crowe, writing on The Map Room, has a better understanding than I had of TomTom’s new Map platform:
TomTom plans to do so by combining map data from its own data, third-party sources, sensor data, and OpenStreetMap. I’ve been around long enough to know that combining disparate map data sources is neither trivial nor easy. It’s also very labour intensive. TomTom says they’ll be using AI and machine learning to automate that process. It’ll be a real accomplishment if they can make it work. It may actually be a very big deal. I suspect it may also be the only way to make this platform remotely any good and financially viable at the same time.
This sounds very ambitious. Automated data fusion has been a popular research topic amongst PhD students for years. Maybe TomTom will be the first organisation to create a viable product this way; who knows?