

Nokia maps  (Source:
Oracle is planning to add Nokia's mapping tech to its applications


Source: Computer World

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RE: Confusing
By zzynko on 10/3/2012 6:23:14 AM , Rating: 2
Just to give u an idea of how they compare to each other...

RE: Confusing
By smyrgl on 10/3/2012 8:29:16 AM , Rating: 2
It kind of misses the point though--Navteq is best compared to TomTom (formerly TeleAtlas) in that it is a data source that was built for embedded and then brought to scale up to having live elements rather than Google's reversed approach.

Offline mapping is neat but it's really not as useful as a lot of people might think. First off it's downright useless for any POI or search type stuff since the embedded POI data is garbage and it's really hard to do embedded search without massive indexes that don't fit in the embedded model (just try a non-connected navigation product already on the market to see what I mean) and you end up providing very different quality of results depending on whether you are pointing to the embedded or "live" data.

Google doesn't have this problem because they only cache the MAPS offline, not the POI data. And that's very smart of them--trying to keep POI data fresh on a device is a nightmare and it's never really been executed well which is why there is so much push towards online search. This isn't just about the processing power, it's about indexing ~60-80 million records per country, de-duping them and creating meaningful indexes (which are TB in size).

About the only thing that makes rational sense for offline maps is just that--the maps. With offline map data you can allow for gaps in data to be smoothly covered over and hypothetically you can use it to reduce the need to pull down data in the first place. Of course this assumes that the data updates can be pushed out in such a way that doesn't exceed the user's data usage of maps but this isn't such a big problem for map data since it is not as in flux as POI results.

