Open Sauce, government-run map site canes Google's

SEARCH GIANT Google might have its Latin American regional HQ in Buenos Aires, but when it comes to Google Maps, the city looks like a big parking lot.

A government-run map site built on open source software is one of the best kept secrets of this city and beats Google's hands down.

While Google spent time and money to bring Vinton Cerf to do a brilliant speech in Buenos Aires, extending Google Map to cover this humongous city doesn't seem to be a high priority for the firm.

It feels under little pressure to do it, because while Google ignores the three million inhabitants in need of quick directions - satellite pics are there but street maps and directions are not- the City Council has been busy at work adding features and updating its own official map site, a project started two years ago and built entirely with Open Source software.

The city's statistics body also hosts its own Directorate of Geographical Information Systems, USIG for short in its Spanish acronym. The USIG collects all sorts of geographical data, from aerial pics of every square foot of the city to the way traffic goes on each street, all this including supposedly accurate coordinates, of course.

Since they have this huge database, it'd only made sense they put it to some use and give back a useful service to us, the taxpayers.

Metro/Tube/Underground lines and the different neighborhood names

It began two years ago as an experiment, to create the city's own map web site. It was developed on a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM, running Red Hat Linux 8.0 and also hosting a PostgreSQL database in the same machine.

The developers used PostGIS, a piece of open sauce with "spatially enables" the database, using it as a back-end for the geographic information system (GIS) software MapServer. This was originally developed by the University of Minnesota in a project with the same state's Dept. of Natural Resources. NASA collaborated with MapServer development as well. So clearly this wasn't a "one geek in a basement" kind of project.

When introduced, the service was hailed by the local press as innovative, but also there were complaints about its slow speed and perceived lack of features. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then and the service is now not only quite fast, but the boffins in charge of it have been tweaking it and adding feature after feature.

Unlike Google's "perpetual beta" tradition, this one dropped the "beta" tag some time ago and is currently at "version 1.5" according to the web page. There are regular updates - the status of which you can see on the web's own "news" page - and new "layers" of information merged into the database. For instance, they recently added hospitals, police stations, and updated the traffic circulation data to the database.

Photo and map views compared, contrasted...

When it comes to features, it allows you to go to places by entering a street name and number, or the intersection of two street names. It can plot you the way from point a to b by walking (the shortest path), or also the shortest path for drivers. Like Google's you can switch between map and aerial-photo view.

Unlike Google's, the pictures on these maps are satellite for the latest version, but aerial photography for the earlier runs. Currently in the B.A. database are satellite pics from 2004, and aerial photos from 1978, 1965, and 1940 - black and white! You can switch between the different views by clicking on Imagenes y Fotografias and see the growth of the city, or what was there in the high rise building you're currently sitting at - probably a single story house.

1940s aerial view of the place that currently hosts the INQ's LatAm HQ

A drop-down dubbed "Useful data" allows you to see - regardless of where you're positioned in the map - the nearest hospital, the nearest police station, what bus lines run through that city section, and the name of the neighbourhood. Since the government uses these aerial pics for their very own purpose of collecting taxes, they also have access to the plans of every lot, and that data is entered as well, so you not only see street names and blocks, you see the actual lot divisions. Want more? when you click on a drop down dubbed "lot data " and then click on a given lot, you can see a picture of the place's facade and the dimensions of the lot. In the case of buildings, you can see the number of floors and basement levels. Try to gather all that just from your Keyhole satellite pics, Google. ;)

Say you want to find what a given lot looks like, you can see a photo of any lot, and its associated data.

Some say that the portals developed by Buenos Aires' local government are at risk, specially some of the employees themselves. These portals won several awards over the years and the outgoing mayor -facing a budget crisis product of his own campaign spending- has reportedly axed the salary of some of the personnel who works on these portals by as much as 60 per cent.

The future doesn't look very good as a centre-right party headed by a local tycoon won the last elections and his party isn't very friendly towards government spending - but only time will tell. Some think he'll come into office sporting a big axe to cut government programmes, in addition of a tax hike he's currently supporting. It's hard to avoid not drawing parallels to the rise of mayor Bloomberg in NYC.

Above: plotting a route for pedentrians, and below, another for driving

This map is far from perfect, as it lacks tools to let users embed map locations on blogs and web pages, but considering the amount of information they put into this database and how well everything works, specially considering the low pay of local civil servants down here, my hat's off to these developers and the team in charge of it.

Ironically, the USIG sells the geographic data -spatial data including coordinates- for about $100 pesos (£15.64) per CD, and aerial photographs priced per megabyte to just anyone who asks for them. Maybe Google is short of funds... perhaps we'd need to arrange a festival to collect funds so they can make Google Maps on par with the city-run map site?

Google is too busy conquering the World to care about lousy B.A. city...

On the other hand the progressive in me says "who needs Google?" ... and with such a great map site already done and paid for with our taxes, it's a good question. What the powers that be should do now is emulate Larry and Sergey and start turning that wonderful site into extra income for the government, so civil servants have their wages increased not reduced, and so that our taxes can be reduced as well. What? Naive? Let me dream. Who'd have dreamed of a government-run site that kicks Google's rear end? µ

L'INQS
Official Map Site (Spanish UI)
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Buenos Aires is the new Expat-Haven
Oct 2006 complaint by blogger about lack of street maps in Google's service
Google Maps satellite pics mashup for Buenos Aires
Commercial Argentina maps for Garmin GPS units
Buenos Aires geocoder
User-created, free B.A. maps for Garmin PDAs and GPS devices