People around the world who use Google's online maps may be getting directions from Richard Hintz.
Mr. Hintz, a 62-year-old engineer who lives in Berkeley, California, has tweaked the locations of more than 200 business listings and points of interest in cities across the state, sliding an on-screen place marker down the block here, moving another one across the street there. Farther afield, he has mapped parts of Cambodia and Laos, where he likes to go on motorcycle trips.
Mr. Hintz said these acts of geo-volunteerism were motivated in part by self-interest: he wants to know where he is going. But "it has this added attraction that it helps others," he said.
Mr. Hintz is a foot soldier in an army of volunteer cartographers who are logging every detail of neighborhoods near and far into online atlases. From Petaluma in California to Peshawar in Pakistan, these amateurs are arming themselves with GPS devices and software to create digital maps where none were available before, or fixing mistakes and adding information on existing ones.
Google has relied on volunteers to create digital maps of 140 countries, including India, Pakistan and the Philippines, that are more complete than many maps created professionally.
Like contributors to Wikipedia before them, they are democratizing a field that used to be the exclusive domain of professionals and specialists. And the information they gather is becoming increasingly valuable commercially.
Google, for example, sees maps playing a growing strategic role in its business, especially as people use cell phones to find places to visit, shop and eat. It needs reliable data  about the locations of businesses and other destinations.
"The way you get that data is having users precisely locate things," said John Hanke, a vice president of product management who oversees Google's mapping efforts.
People have been contributing information to digital maps for some time, building displays of crime statistics or apartment rentals. Now they are creating and editing the underlying maps of streets, highways, rivers and coastlines.
"It is a huge shift," said Michael F. Goodchild, a professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "This is putting mapping where it should be, which is the hands of local people who know an area well."
That is changing the dynamics of an industry that has been dominated by a handful of digital mapping companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq.
Google is increasingly bypassing those traditional map providers. Last month, Google dropped Tele Atlas data from its U.S. maps, choosing to rely instead on government data and other sources, including updates from users. (continued...)
© 2010 International Herald Tribune under contract with MarketWatch. All rights reserved.
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