[mkgmap-dev] [locator] What's next?

Tue Jun 7 06:08:08 BST 2011

Johann Gail (johann.gail at gmx.de) wrote:

>
>> available at all.  In the UAE, for instance, there is no formal,
>> systematic address system *whatsoever* (it is completely normal here
>> to give your home location relative to local landmarks such as parks,
>> mosques and malls, rather than giving an address.  Makes getting home
>> deliveries a nightmare, but that's another story) so we couldn't add
>> data to the database even if we wanted to.
>>
> Thanks for delivering some background information.
>
> Just out of curiosity:
> How are the adresses mapped in commercial databases and commercial
> navigation systems? Are the ususal fields like region, city, street not
> used in UAE maps? How do you enter an address relative to landmarks into
> a gpsr?
>
>
I have absolutely no idea.  But there is no domestic postal service  
(whether this is a cause, or a consequence, of the lack of addresses I  
don't know).  If you want to receive mail, you receive it to a central  
PO Box and go to pick it up.  When we bought a bed (in person at the  
shop) we had to draw a map of our location for the delivery man (using  
major streets and landmarks), because the house we live in has no  
formal address.

In Abu Dhabi (and I suspect also in the other Emirates), a major  
problem is that most residential streets are just numbered, rather  
than named, so you have hundreds of 1st Streets, hundreds of 3rd  
Streets etc (compare  
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=24.47457&lon=54.37276&zoom=16&layers=M with  
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=24.45496&lon=54.37316&zoom=17&layers=M -  
different location, but same street names). There is no postal code to  
help differentiate them.

"Maps" over here are still a novel concept.  If a business gives a  
map, it will quite often be handdrawn, and they sometimes just give  
you the GPS coordinates directly, see for example the German Vet  
clinic: http://www.germanvet.ae/contact.html.  IKEA recently  
distributed their new catalogue to all domestic residences and it  
actually made national news as the sheer logistics of trying to do  
this when you don't actually know what all the domestic residences are  
was considered newsworthy!

--
Charlie