Africa mostly mapped

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 14 Mar 2008

Africa is now mostly mapped and the task will be complete by early next year, say cartographic wholesalers Map-IT and Tele Atlas Africa. However, company officials concede granularity can still be improved.

Tele Atlas sales and marketing director John Dann says all of Africa, south of the equator - bar Angola - has been topographically mapped to a granularity sufficient for road navigation and telecommunications use. This includes Madagascar, Reunion and Mauritius. Work in several Sahel countries is also complete.

Accurate street-level maps of many major cities in these countries are now also available to navigation service providers and vendors, he adds.

The mapping of several countries, including Angola, is still under way and the remainder are scheduled for attention this year. Dann says the maps scale from 1:50 000 to 1:200 000.

Tele Atlas Africa - previously Georigin - owns a 49% share of Map-IT, which did much of the map-making. Map-IT MD Ray Wilkinson says the tie-up "will also result in our data becoming ISO-certified".

"The biggest hurdle we faced in trying to do business with international vehicle manufacturers was converting local data into the international format used by these organisations," he explains. Tele Atlas can now provide data in the required format, he adds.

Growing market

Wilkinson says the mapping industry generally, and his company particularly, has good growth prospects. From 2006 to the end of 2007, local demand for personal navigation data grew by 300% and business usage is also ballooning.

The company is a long-standing content provider to most leading suppliers of personal navigation devices in SA, including Garmin, Tom Tom, Siemens VDO, Mio, and JNC.

The company also provides geo-location and mapping data for tracking and fleet management activities, emergency services, call centres, government, the SA National Defence Force, the State IT Agency, utility companies, mobile phone providers and Web mapping services.

Future plans

Wilkinson says future plans for the South African market include the development of three-dimensional navigation mapping using Tele Atlas software.

This will "produce more realistic and detailed displays for our mapsets that will include the identification of landmarks and street-level identifying features," he predicts.

"While driving, you will be able to see and identify aspects of your route that will stand out on the display of a navigation device in full three-dimensional form," adds Wilkinson.