Mapping NH in an orange van

location based services

Lebanon – Jeremy Onysko is accustomed to the curious stares from other drivers and the wisecracks about “Big Brother watching.”
After all, the 2006 University of New Hampshire graduate is spending his summer driving around in a bright orange van with four cameras mounted on its roof, along with a GPS antenna that looks a bit like a 1950s-vintage flying saucer.
The Toyota Sienna — with its slogan: “We’re mapping your world” — is one of 10 mobile mapping vans that hit the road last December for Tele Atlas. The Lebanon company is mapping all 120,000 miles of America’s limited-access highways this summer, according to Jay Benson, vice president of business planning.
If you’ve ever looked for directions on Mapquest, used your onboard navigation system in your car, or planned a trip by searching online for hotels and restaurants, you’ve probably used Tele Atlas mapping data. The company provides digital mapping for the personal navigation, Internet mapping, wireless and automotive markets.
Global firm
The local company started out as Geographic Data Technology Inc., which was founded in Lyme in 1980 and moved to Lebanon in 1994. GDT was bought by Tele Atlas two years ago, becoming part of a global company that last year saw revenues of $239 million.
Benson said when Tele Atlas bought GDT, local company officials convinced the global team to site its American headquarters in Lebanon. “We’ve had a successful history here and we plan to keep being successful in New Hampshire.”
With its global corporate office in the Netherlands, Tele Atlas employs about 2,300 people in 30 countries, including more than 500 people here in Lebanon.
Benson said recent market trends are driving his company’s success. “We’ve been building this data since 1980, but what we’re seeing now is a shift from when it was only affordable and usable in the business-to-business marketplace, to where now the consumer markets are opening up.”
Internet maps
More and more consumers are using the Internet to find services the way they used to use the yellow pages, Benson noted. And most now expect to be able to pull up a map after they locate the desired service or store.
“Mapping is starting to move from the guide — trying to get from point a to point b — to . . . how can information be delivered to me with some sort of location awareness to it.”
Tele Atlas’ clients include Google, Mapquest, Fed Ex, Pioneer, Sprint and Mercedes. One of its latest partners is TomTom, which makes a portable navigation device that can help you find directions and services anywhere in the country.
“They use our content to deliver applications that give either a business or consumer the ability to find more information, and more information with contextual importance because it is near where they are,” Benson said.
Onysko, 22, just graduated last month from the University of New Hampshire; he majored in geography, which had always been “a passion,” he said. He hopes to pursue a graduate degree in spatial information science and engineering this fall at the University of Maine.
The paid internship with Tele Atlas’ Highway Attribute Improvement Project seemed the perfect way to combine his interests in our world and the technology that is changing that world. “Everything’s being put on computer, including where we live,” he explained.
So far this summer, Onysko’s work has taken him to Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Vermont; his current assignment is New Hampshire.
“It’s an excellent opportunity for a student like me, trying to break into one of these fast-growing, high-paced mapping industries,” he said.
Geography major
Plus he gets to travel the country in air-conditioned comfort, doing just the kind of work for which he went to school. “I’m interested in the world we live in,” Onysko said. “That’s why I became a geography major. So being able to have a position that gets me out on the road and gives me an opportunity to travel, that’s fun for me.”
Every 10 meters, the van’s rooftop cameras capture images of the roadway and surrounding features, while the GPS system tracks its route. The cameras are stationary; it’s the driver who makes sure everything he needs is being recorded, Onysko explained.
“I have to drive in a productive fashion,” he said.
Safe driving
That may mean leaving extra distance between the van and a truck in the lane ahead so the cameras can properly record highway signs. And it could mean retracing his route to capture the signage and dimensions of a tricky exit ramp.
What he’s looking for, Onysko explained during an on-road demonstration last week, are highway signs, lane changes, exit ramps — “any information that would be useful in navigating around the highways.”
Once full, the onboard, 250-gigabyte hard drives containing the images and GPS data Onysko has collected are sent back to the Lebanon office for quality control, then shipped to Tele Atlas offices in Poland for processing. There, they will eventually be integrated into the company’s mapping database.
The bright orange color of the company vans was a deliberate choice, Benson said.
“The earlier version of the vans were not quite so visible, and sometimes we’d get calls from concerned citizens saying, ‘There’s this van going up and down the street that’s got these funny things on top.’”
So Tele Atlas officials decided to choose a brighter color, with the company’s slogan and logo — a child riding on the back of a goose, drawn from a Swedish children’s book — featured prominently. “It puts out in the open what we’re doing, because we’re not trying to hide what we’re doing,” Benson said.
Besides, he said, “It’s a marketing vehicle — no pun intended.”
Many sources
There’s a lot more to the company’s work than the data from the mobile mapping vans. Tele Atlas uses more than 50,000 data sources to compile its databases, everything from town tax maps, to data from utilities and the postal service, to aerial imagery from planes and satellites.
Think of anything you might want to look up — a hotel, restaurant, golf course, doctor’s office or even a rest stop — as a “point of interest.”
The Tele Atlas database has more than 20 million of these points of interest, in more than 50 countries worldwide. It includes 7.3 million miles of roads within North America alone.
From just regular folks trying to get to an address safely and easily, to businesses that rely on mapping data to deliver packages and services, to emergency personnel who have to get somewhere fast, the work his company does is important, Onysko said. “This is the way everything is going, and we need to make sure everything is as accurate as possible.”
Big brother
As for those occasional cracks about Big Brother, he said, “It’s all very light-hearted.”
More often, he said, people approach him to report problems they’ve encountered with online map sites. “Everyone’s got one of those stories: ‘Mapquest sent me to the wrong address,’ or ‘You need to redo my road.’”
Onysko said he explains to these folks that while he’s on another project this summer, someone else will be updating those local roads. “That’s what all of us are working toward, making the most accurate, most up-to-date roadway network,” he said.
Benson acknowledged some people have concerns about privacy, as more and more information is being compiled into massive databases. He said his company takes those concerns “very, very seriously.”
“Tele Atlas is very, very, very careful not to have any personal data in our database,” Benson said.
Anything in the Tele Atlas database “can be found by going to the town office,” he said. “We specifically designed our business to be generic.”
“What I like to think is we help people find things in the right place, but they already know it exists. If you don’t know an address exists, you can’t type it in to get there.”