Innovating modern map making with earthmine

Because we know that maps are hard to get right, we have been investing and will continue to invest time and money to build the world’s most powerful location offering, one that is unlike anything in the market today. Content creation in cartography is a continuous quest to make maps more precise and to map the whole world. We useinnovative collection technologies (e.g. LiDAR, cameras, etc.) and a team of local experts to create close to perfect digital copies of reality.

Innovating map making

Map makers today have a vast array of data at their disposal and digital technology has made the map accessible to everyone. But at their core today’s digital maps are little changed from paper maps: they are static because they represent the world at the moment the data is captured and they still require a lot of work and imagination to get the most out of them.

We believe, in fact, that location services are revolutionizing how we use technology to engage with the real world. This is why we are innovating every aspect of what a cartographer does: we use data that’s never been incorporated into maps and then make sense of it in a way that transforms the experience. We are innovating what we capture, the way we capture it, and how we model to give rise to a new generation of user experiences.

earthmine acquisition

Today our industrial collection of data is about to leap a chasm with the planned acquisition of earthmine.

earthmine offers a complete solution for collecting, processing, managing, and hosting 3D street level imagery. This will add competitive advantages and increased differentiation to HERE‘s Location Content and Location Platform, sustaining competitiveness in B2B (e.g. data for in-car navigation systems) and driving highly engaging user experiences.

earthmine is going to be a major asset in our arsenal of collection tools in that it complements our internal technologies with capabilities that enhance what we are already doing. The most obvious is the sensor design and integration that can be seen on a earthmine car, which enables mobile mapping and is massively scalable. And when we collect with earthmine we get the same wealth of visual and other sensor data that enables us achieve our mapmaking automation goals. By next year, with earthmine we will expand the number of countries to 31 in which we are automatically collecting 3D information. Additionally, earthmine brings advanced image processing capability and geographic information system tools that make the processed imagery and data readily available enabling us to move faster than we otherwise could.

Follow us on Twitter: @heremaps.