While reading various coverage blog posts about last month’s Google Map Maker Philippine Launch event, I came across a website that was spammed (?) in the comments section of several of those blog posts. This website is the so-called Manila Road Map and it purports to be “the most detailed road map of Metro Manila”. Of course, I, being who I am, exclaimed, “oh, really?”.

The website is basically a one-page website with 2 Google AdSense ads, a couple of map legend images, and the main attraction: a hand-crafted road map made zoomable (a la Google Maps) by Zoomify. Unlike Google Maps that shows more detail as you zoom in, Manila Road Map’s map is simply a very large image that’s unreadable when zoomed out and requires zooming in to see the details. It’s essentially like your regular dead-tree paper map. Well, one advantage to Manila Road Map’s approach as opposed to Google’s automatically-generated maps is that you can optimize the labeling of a map for aesthetic and readability purposes (when zoomed in)—something a software can’t do without sophisticated algorithms. The disadvantage is that it’s very tedious and it’s not feasible to create multiple such maps at various zoom levels.

Technical details aside, is the map good enough? Well, aside from not including Navotas, Malabon, Valenzuela, Las Piñas, and Muntinlupa—which belies its claim of being the “most detailed road map of Metro Manila”, there are plenty of details that are just plain wrong. The most scandalous error I’ve seen is shown below. There’s an utterly bizarre extra road along Ortigas Avenue starting from ADB Avenue going east to Meralco Avenue. As anyone who has passed by that area can attest, there’s no such road. This error is the most egregious I’ve seen and who knows what other minor errors there are on the map (I’ve seen plenty).

While the makers of the website have begged for forgiveness for any errors and omissions, and while other online maps such as Google Map Maker and OpenStreetMap also contain mistakes and omissions, the advantage of Google Map Maker and OSM is that you can correct such mistakes yourself. And a crowd-sourcing approach to creating maps is proving to be a winning proposition.

As I see it, Manila Road Map is fighting a losing battle if they want to be the go-to site for an online Metro Manila map. They are currently not providing anything of greater value than what is already out there, and they cannot hope to compete with projects like OpenStreetMap and Google Map Maker (and even Wikimapia Beta, but I’ll leave that for another post [which is now available]) in having the most complete and updated street data of Metro Manila. I’d be surprised if they’re actually getting enough revenue from their AdSense ads (which seems to be the raison d’être for such a project).