Google caring more on kerala mapping

The Google Mapping Party, proposed to be held here on February 5, hopes to make Kerala, particularly Thiruvananthapuram, a better mapped place.More than 100 persons including five officials from the Kerala Land Information Mission (Bhoomikeralam) will be attending the ‘Party’ sponsored by search engine giant Google.

 The event is being organised by the Kerala Section of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Thiruvananthapuram Chapter of the Computer Society of India.The organisers hope to increase public awareness about Google’s Mapmaker service which allows users to become citizen cartographers and improve the quality of maps and location information.

Presently, a handful of users have started mapping different parts of Kerala. The event aims to increase the user community to a higher figure, thus making Kerala, particularly Thiruvananthapuram, a completely mapped and popular destination in Google Maps. Relevant local information such as that on roads, schools, hospitals, banks and importance places will be entered by users having local knowledge.Mr. Ajith Kumar, Map Strategist and Manager (Operations), and cartographers of Google, will attend the event. They will show participants how to map different places, draw roads, add categories and discuss other features.

The Kerala Land Information Mission is already using Google maps to identify locations to start their surveys, as the old survey records do not clearly indicate roads, streams and other natural boundaries.Its officials hope to learn best practices and get information useful for their work from the Mapping Party, Bhoomikeralam Director Biju Prabhakar said.

In future, Bhoomikeralam would offer landholders in Kerala the facility to superimpose their boundaries of their land into Google maps. Both Google maps and Bhoomikeralam use similar formats for its maps.