Visualizing HERE location data

We have previously explained how we maintain and update our maps by relying on a number of data sources and innovative tools that can detect changes and trigger action points.

Last week we also announced an expansion of our traffic service, which uses the wisdom of the crowd to offer real-time updates.

All this wouldn’t be possible without anonymously collecting data on how HERE is being used around the world on 1 billion devices like smartphones, cars and computers (based on our internal stats).

To make sense of this data, a team in Berlin is visualizing it on a map.

More and more of our connected devices are able to sense the real world around us, taking the ‘personal’ to new levels.

Nowadays, every smartphone has GPS and other sensors to help integrate the real with the virtual world.

This is why, to build our location services, we don’t just capture an index of streets, buildings and parks to create a rich model of the real world.

More importantly, we are also combing reference data, activity data and smart data to deliver location experiences that help people make sense of their urban environments. Our technologies can turn all this data into real experiences. 

We can, for instance, understand how the population of big countries is distributed. This is particularly helpful when we want to maintain the accuracy of our maps in the most populated areas.

In the following map, you can see the areas in Argentina where the most people are, as opposed to where we are concentrating our mapping efforts.

When your smartphone finds your location to let you use HERE Maps or other services, it tells us which technology it is using (GPS, Wi-Fi, Cell-ID).

Because these positioning technologies have varying levels of accuracy, we can understand where in the world you can use location based services more precisely and where improvements are needed.

In the following picture, you can see where the positioning was least precise, like when underground.

And this is the distribution of people who have selected Chinese as their phone’s language in Eurasia. Pretty impressive, isn’t it?

 

While visiting the campus in Berlin and having a look at this tool, our CEO Stephen Elop said, “What was particularly exciting is that you could see a dramatic change over just a year’s time. Through this data, you could see a clear growth pattern for Lumia. Consumers are lighting up the world with Lumia, and the data is a powerful visualization of that momentum”.

Click through on each image to see a higher resolution version.