What's Missing from the New Google Maps?

I was all excited to learn that Google is now allowing user-created data in custom maps. This is great! However, when I went to go play with it, I learned the current implementation - which in most ways is an alpha release - is missing 90% of what could make it useful. Such as:

• the ability to import, not just export, addresses. I want to make a canonical map of all currently existing properties by the late great architects Greene & Greene; this is not very easy by hand-entering every single one. However, if I could import tab-delimited text, I could have the full list of 200 up in a few minutes!
• the ability to display multiple maps at once - on top of each other (i.e., LAYERS). this would make google maps a useful tool for data analysis: you could display maps of different data layers at once, but what would make this feature REALLY shine would be...
• the ability to pipe in data from online databases. if you combined #1 with the ability to bring data in from online databases, not just uploaded text files, you could use this with the ability to see different layers at once to see real causality - that is, you could see how income, for example, and property values, tax base, parks, etc. all interact. It would be a really democratic tool - the ability, for example, to see if public works projects actually happen in poor neighborhoods as they do in rich, or to see what zipcodes public university admissions come from (if that data were available), or to see what area codes had the most telemarketer calls originating, etc. In fact, this would turn Google Maps into the ultimate social researcher's dream tool - the killer app that sociologists, activists, criminologists and others have been waiting for.

Just a few (big) suggestions for the Google Maps folks to think about...

Comments

[Brendan]

And remember -- the great thing about Google is that they actually read their comments. Send in those suggestions and you just may find yourself getting your wishes fulfilled.

[ian]

All of this is possible. You can use tools like batchgeocode.com to turn street addresses into lat/long with high precision, and export this to a google earth/maps KML overlay. With a bit of scripting glue it can be tied to an arbitrary data source -- in fact, I have done this myself. You can extract additional power by directly interfacing with the google maps API and creating your own map. This lets you have arbitrary layers and as many data points, lines, overlay images, etc., as you like.

You can email me if you have any specific questions.

[jlt]

Ian, I may do that!

It would be great to see these features built into Gmaps, though - it would mean researchers and reporters and students could tie their research - demographic, epidemiological, social, economic - in with the maps and share them.

The ability to make google maps shareable with other people and different levels of permission (like google calendars - in fact, almost exactly like that!) would make this a really powerful tool for collaborative research. The possibilities are really endless ... it would be perhaps the most powerful tool for social research ever made.

[Tracy Rolling]

Why not use Platial? You can bulk import. There are layers. It's still in beta, but it does pretty much what you want.

(I work for Platial and read this blog pretty often. tracy at platial dot com)

[joshua]

Hi Tracy. I tried to upload a small CSV of Greene houses to a new platial map, but it's been almost a week and the files are still "not ready to be reviewed yet" ... is that process not automated? Does it have to be hand-entered on your end? Maybe it would be faster for me to just enter all 100 or so addresses by hand?

[Thomas]

It looks like they've updated google maps to add multiple layers of maps. But does anyone know the status on if they are going to make a change regarding bulk import? Or the third request of online piping?