Maps & Sounds for Many Countries

This page tells you something about the mapping that you can download from this web site for use with GPSS. For 2 years this page was called "To Those of You Outside the UK" and when GPSS was first released over 3 years ago, most of our users were in the UK. Now they are worldwide, and you may contact a few via our links page.

People with GPS you can contact from our Links Page

When someone contacts us from a new place, and has reached the stage of running the GPS Software off this site with a GPS receiver, we upload maps for them - and anyone else near them. If they are in a new country, then we will normally upload maps and sounds covering the whole country. These will normally be based upon Public Domain data, and similar in detail to the Boston map on the left. If available, we will also upload more detailed maps of their home town, such as the map of Tokyo on the right. These 'bundles' of mapping are all less than 1.5MB, so that they can easily be copied to floppy disk, and so the downloading process is not too slow.
Very large countries, such as the USA and Australia, have this 'Boston Map' detail in highly populated areas. Less detailed maps cover the whole country. The voice description of position, and voice guidance to a place, is not limited to the detail of the displayed map. The GPSS speech and 'Instrument Panel' can guide you to within metres of your destination - even if the displayed map is very poor. The speech can also describe where you are relative to major towns - and sometimes relative to a local landmark. e.g. "Tokyo Tower" or "Big Ben" in London. This Tokyo map is used with the permission of Bartholomew, who provide the maps printed in The Times World Atlas.
Those of you lucky enough to live in the USA may know that your Goverment map data is mostly Public Domain. i.e. there are no copyright fees. This means that, for a few dollars, you can buy a product like Chicago Map Corporations (CMC) "Precision Mapping 3" (PM3) which has street level mapping for the whole of the USA. These are typical extracts from the samples of the PM3 based mapping that can be downloaded off the USA Download page. When this are retrieved by GPSS, a copyright statement is displayed, with a link to the CMC web site : www.chicagomap.com Note that all maps you download from this site ARE NOT FREE OF COPYRIGHT. You may only download them for free use with GPSS. Even the Boston map above, based on DCW Public Domain data, is the copyright of Sunninghill Systems. Businesses, and map copyright owners, such as Bartholomew or Ordnance Survey in the UK, and AUSLIG or Universal Publishing in Australia, have granted permission for Sunninghill Systems to distibute these samples under strict conditions - such as the copyright statement that appears when the map is displayed by GPSS. Robin Lovelock is grateful for their cooperation in this.

For the majority of countries in the world, detailed mapping costs money. The copyright fees alone can be too expensive for anything other than specialist business use. However, this is gradually changing, and low cost CDROM products are begining to appear at consumer prices. For these countries where mapping is not 'free', it is possible to download non-detailed mapping (like the Boston map above) covering all the country, plus sample maps of particular areas - with the copyright owners permission. The 1:5,000 street level map on the left is part of the sample which Bartholomew permitted to be put on the UK Download page. Many other examples will be found, each from a different organisation within the country concerned.

Collaboration

We will be pleased to hear from any overseas individual or company who wishes to collaborate in configuration of GPSS for use within their own country. This involves issues such as collection and conversion of suitable map data (e.g. locations of petrol filling stations), the spoken language, and the means of promotion and distribution.

Perhaps you can help by putting us in contact with PC Magazines who may publish GPSS on their cover CD-ROMs, or GPS suppliers who can give GPSS away with their receivers.

We are also happy to talk with any business who may wish to distribute GPSS with their own software or data products. e.g. voice recognition software, mapping, tourist information.