During the visit to Turin, I had an opportunity to experience the consequences of address matching and georeferencing which I’ve noted in the entry ‘British Museum Test’. After touring the city, I needed to get to a restaurant to meet colleagues that were staying in the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) in Turin. The meeting place was the ‘Il Porto di Savona’ restaurant in Piazza Vittorio Veneto 2. Since the hotel room was connected to the Internet through a relatively slow ‘Swisscom Hospitality Service’ connection, I decided to try to find my way to the restaurant with Google Maps, which are the fastest to download.
My first attempt with Google was unsuccessful – trying to search for ‘Piazza Vittorio Veneto 2, Turin’ pointed me to a place 10 miles away from the city. The next attempt was with Yahoo! Maps, but this one could not find anything. Microsoft Virtual Earth failed to find the full name, but offered a location called ‘Piazza Vittorio’ which I selected, only to zoom in and discover that the full proper name does appear on the map! Using this name (‘Piazza Vittorio’) with Google also worked and it managed to find the location.
Interestingly, because the connection was relatively slow, the interface of Microsoft was fairly annoying as parts failed to upload, and I was deterred from using Multimap as I’ve experienced slow response in the past on a fast broadband connection at home. Even so, checking more recently with Multimap shows that it will direct you to the wrong place in the city – although again, if you zoom to the map, the square is clearly mapped with its proper name…
The experience demonstrated how significant the problem of georeferencing is on these public mapping sites. This is a fundamental problem for these search engines to make them really usable. In this case, I used my knowledge of the range of public mapping sites, manipulated the address until I got the location and did a lot of things that, I suspect, a less experienced user would not do. I persevered with the problem because of my interest in usability and because it was an interesting problem. Actually, in terms of efficiency, it would have taken me less time to just go downstairs and ask the concierge…
Another aspect is that download time still matters. This is an aspect that web designers tend to ignore. I suspect that the assumption here is that broadband connections are ubiquitous. The speed of downloading a page is significant in geospatial applications – because there is no way round the fact that, unlike text based sites, the map is the most significant part and must be delivered as graphic files which tend to bulk-up the overall size of the page, as far as the end-user is concerned.
I must note that once I managed to find the location, it was again a pleasure to use the old style tourist map to navigate to and from the restaurant, which, by the way, I warmly recommend.
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