San Francisco — The technical difficulties of maintaining a detailed map of the world are hard enough, but things get even more complicated when you factor in political issues like border disputes. Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine titan Google late Tuesday announced “significant improvements to [their] borders for over 60 countries and regions” that will be displayed on Google Maps and (coming to Google Earth soon).
This is tricky and Google has been criticized in the past for issues relating to borders and other sensitive issues. However, Google strives to maintain a neutral attitude, but, in many cases, there is no universally accepted version so the Maps team has to try to satisfy everyone.
The modifications are configured to more accurately indicate regions that are claimed by different governments. Maps will also now be able to more closely follow borders that run along natural boundaries such as the Pamir Mountain Range that separates Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Google Maps images of a disputed island that borders Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina now more precisely indicates political reality.
“Today we are delighted to announce some significant improvements to our borders for over 60 countries and regions… Similar to satellite imagery, boundary data is accessible in varying levels of resolution; the higher the resolution, the better the boundaries will follow specific geographic features, such as rivers,” Charlie Hale, Geo Policy Analyst at Google, wrote.
“While we always attempt to display the on-the-ground truth of a boundary’s position, in practice some boundary lines are not as accurate as we would like them to be due to the available resolution of our boundary data. With these improvements, many borders will now more closely follow natural boundaries such as mountains and rivers,” he added.
How international boundaries are drawn has been a politically sensitive issue since well before Google got into the mapping game. With the latest update, the accuracy of borders has also been greatly improved.
“Making Google’s mapping tools as accurate as possible is a complex process, especially when a map’s accuracy has both quantitative and qualitative aspects,” explains Hale. New data is always added to Google Maps, “We receive spatial data of all kinds – satellite imagery, boundaries, place names, new Street View images etc. – from a variety of sources worldwide, and we review them carefully before integrating them into the best representation of a given location in Google Earth and Maps.”
The update is quite important and Google is highlighting some of the most notable and impressive changes. For example, the border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan is a lot more accurate. A portion of it follows a mountain ridge and with the update, the border displayed in Google Maps and Earth now follows the geography a lot closer than before. In another example, the representation of a portion of the border between Ethiopia and Somalia has been changed to reflect its disputed status.
“In the case of geopolitical features on our maps, the depiction of borders is something upon which local authorities, governments and internationally recognized bodies often disagree,” says Hale. “Our aim is to provide the most legible and accurate maps we can given the information available in these oft-changing areas of geopolitical disagreement. Like most maps, ours include symbology that makes borders and other geopolitical features clearer to users.”
The new updates are live in Google Maps, and will be coming very soon to Google Earth.
More information and examples of changes can be found here.