When I arrived in Riga three months ago, the map of the city that Google used consisted of about two motorways. Although not opensource, Google Maps is the most open mapping tool to use for this work, so I was keen to use it. After several months of harassing people in Riga, the dataset was recently updated. It contains an amusing error, that makes half the city appear flooded. [The error is still there]

The kind of data used to construct Google Maps is normally the responsibilty of local organisation, such as Ordnance Survey in the UK, so how the Riga error goes unnoticed and uncorrected…

There still remains a massive disparity in the data between Latvia and it’s neighbors. Take Estonia, for example:

We are currently working on the web interface for Location of I, it will be online any day now…