Online maps

I saw someone advocating OpenStreetMaps as a source of online mapping information, and thought I would try the various online mapping services with some of the more obscure places of interest to me. Wikipedia is a great starting point: you can click through to a pretty good selection of mapping services from its navigation pages.

1) Loughbrickland, Northern Ireland. Located at 54°19′N, 6°18′W. Good coverage from Google Maps, WikiMapia, Planeteye.com, maps.msn.co.uk, maps.yahoo.com, Windows Live, MapQuest, Mapper.acme.com, Multimap. But OpenStreetMaps shows only the two main streets.

2) Pristina, Kosovo. Located at 42°40′N 21°10′E. None of the on-line sources I checked shows the current (post-1999) street names. Planeteye.com and Windows Live both have all the streets but with the old Serbian names. OpenStreetMap shows all the streets but with no names at all. None of the others is any use. (If perchance you actually need a map of Pristina, I recommend this guidebook.)

3) Northern Nicosia, Cyprus. Location 35°10’42"N, 33°21’42"E. Oddly enough, neither side of Nicosia is especially well served by online maps. Planeteye.com, MultiMap.com, Maps.ask.com, and Windows Live do mark streets in the north, but grossly inaccurately! OpenStreetMap.com is very good for southern Nicosia, but doesn’t mark many streets on the northern side; at least they are in the right place, if uinnamed. If you actually need a map of northern Nicosia, try thishere.

4) Freetown, Sierra Leone. Location: 8°28′44.4″N, 13°16′6.24″W. Only OpenStreetMap has any level of detail for the streets at all, though no names for any of them. (Here‘s a 1985 CIA map of the city centre; this looks more up to date.)

Basically, online map services still have some way to go, even in some parts of Europe, never mind Africa.

One thought on “Online maps

  1. On the record where he is reading bits of LOTR, he pronounced Moria as Mow-ree-ah as in “mow a meadow” “tree” and “ah, I see you are having trouble thinking of an example!” Before I heard that I pronounced it like Maria only with an o.

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