Received an email from Mike today in reguards to my latest post on the mis-matching of Google map data.

It makes for some interesting research and reading, and also a class project.

Hi!

This Orangeville, PA thing has me real intrigued to find out what is correct.

I work as a GIS planner for a county in Pennsylvania. One of the problems I’ve had has been the source of the information we present to people. I’ve created a ton of work for myself by questioning the source of information that came before I have been employed here. So this is right along the lines of what I do a lot.

The online maps that use Navteq (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Mapquest) show Railroad St and Ricketts St as you have in your GMaps example.

The maps that use TeleAtlas (Google Earth, Wikimapia, Acme Maps) show Ricketts St and no Railroad St.

OpenStreetMap show Railroad St going to the intersection of Creekside Dr and the rest of the street being Ricketts St.

So having found three separate ‘opinions’, I checked with the Penndot Local Streets layer in ArcMAp ( downloaded from PASDA). It shows the street as one segment, but has no labels.

Then, I went to the Columbia County website to see if they had a street map as well. They did, but it is not working at this time. Oddly enough, the parcel search was working, but it only showed text results. A search for Railroad St parcels pulls up quite a few results, but a search for Ricketts St parcels pulls up no results.

Then I remembered PA DOT has a township and borough map page. The map there shows that Navteq was correct.

Whew. That was a good exercise in comparing sources of information and tracking down the answer.  Great way to spend a lunch hour.

Here a list of the links:

I used wikipedia’s map source page for a listing of the online maps for this location:
http://stable.toolserver.org/geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Orangeville,_Pennsylvania&params=41_4_43_N_76_24_52_W_city

Online maps that use navteq:
yahoo: http://maps.yahoo.com/#mvt=m&lat=41.079157&lon=-76.413979&zoom=17
microsoft live local:
http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=41.078948~-76.415105&style=r&lvl=17&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&encType=1
mapquest:
http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Orangeville&state=PA&country=US&latitude=41.078098&longitude=-76.414703&geocode=CITY

TeleAtlas:
wikimapia:
http://www.wikimapia.org/#lat=41.0790196&lon=-76.4141285&z=17&l=0&m=m

unknown:
OpenStreetMap:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/index.html?mlat=41.078611&mlon=-76.414444&zoom=11

PADOT Borough and Township maps:
http://www.dot.state.pa.us/internet/bureaus/pdplanres.nsf/infoBPRTownshipandBoroughMaps?OpenForm&AutoFramed

Orangeville Borough Map:
ftp://ftp.dot.state.pa.us/public/pdf/BPR_pdf_files/Maps/boro/Columbia/19408.pdf

I am going to suggest this to a friend of mine who teaches GIS as a great exercise in considering your sources.