In The fifteenth century, Henry the

In The fifteenth century, Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese prince, presided over a court in Sagres that became a center for cartographers, instrument-makers, and explorers, whose expeditions he sponsored. Seafarers returning to Sagres from the west coast of Africa reported their discoveries, and new maps were produced, extending the reaches of the known world, which in those days did not go much beyond Cape Verde. These maps became very valuable, owing to their utility in trade, war, and soul-saving, and were jealously guarded as state secrets.

The latter-day equivalent is a company called Navteq. It is the leading provider of geographic data to the Internet mapping sites and the personal-navigation industry—the boiler room of the where-you-are-and-what-to-do business. Its only real competitor is a Belgian company called Tele Atlas. Most of the Web sites, car manufacturers, and gizmo-makers—anyone involved in what are known as intelligent transportation systems—get the bulk of their raw material from these two companies. The clients differ mainly in how they choose to present the data. This allows civilians to have preferences. For example, in the recent “Saturday Night Live” mock-rap video “Lazy Sunday” two guys seeking “the dopest route” from the West Village to the Upper West Side consider using Yahoo! Maps:




“I prefer MapQuest!”

“That’s a good one, too.”

“Google Maps is the best.”

“True dat.”

“Double true!”


Despite the digitization of maps and the satellites circling the earth, the cartographic revolution still relies heavily on fresh observations made by people. Navteq, like Prince Henry, produces updates periodically (usually four times a year) for its corporate clients. Its explorers are its geographic analysts, whose job is to go onto the roads to make sure everything that it says about those roads is true—to check the old routes and record the new ones. The practice is called ground-truthing. They drive around and take note of what they call “attributes,” anything of significance to a traveller seeking his way. A road segment can have a hundred and sixty attributes, everything from a speed limit to a drawbridge, an on-ramp, or a prohibition against U-turns. New signs, new roads, new exits, new rules: if such alterations go uncollected by Navteq, the traveller, relying on a device or a map produced by one of Navteq’s clients, might well get lost or confused enough to be “fit for Muldoon’s Asylum,” as the Jones Live-Map brochure put it, in an early acknowledgment of the anguish of being lost in an automobile. (“It’s his for the violent ward, straight and sure.”) A driver making a simple left turn—say, from Broadway onto Forty-second Street—encounters a blizzard of attributes: one-way, speed limit, crosswalk, traffic light, street sign, turn restriction, two-way, hydrant.

Navteq has about six hundred field researchers and offices in twenty-three countries. There are nine field researchers in the New York metropolitan area. One morning this fall, I went out with a pair of them, Chris Arcari and Shovie Singh. They picked me up on Forty-second Street, in a white S.U.V., after making that unextraordinary left off Broadway. “We’re going to be working over by LaGuardia Airport,” Arcari said. “One of the items we need to check out is some street names. They’ve put up new signs. Then we’ll proceed to an area that we have targeted.” Arcari, who is thirty-seven and was brought up on Long Island, was the senior member of the team, and he tended to speak in the formal, euphemistic manner of a police officer testifying in court. He’d been with Navteq for ten years. Singh, a native of Trinidad who grew up in Queens, was a new hire. He’d got hooked on geography after taking some classes in the subject in college.

They were, you might say, free-driving—no navigation device or map—being not only locals but also professionals in the arcane and endlessly fascinating tri-state-area discipline of getting from here to there. They spend two to three days a week just driving around. Manhattan’s grid may be the easiest road network to master in the developed world (if we overlook the nuances), yet the routes leading to and from it are as tricky as the tributaries of the Amazon. (One of the things you notice, as you approach New York City, is that there are almost no signs saying “Manhattan.” Instead, the traveller is introduced to such notions as “Mosholu” and “Major Deegan.”) The highways are a mad thatch of interstates, parkways, boulevards, and spurs, plus river crossings galore, each with its own virtues and idiosyncrasies. There are many ways to get from point A to point B in New York, and, because of all the permutations, anyone can be a route-selection expert, or at least an enthusiast. Family gatherings inevitably feature a clutch of relatives eating cocktail nuts and arguing over the merits of various exits and shortcuts. So it was that I found myself muttering a bit when Arcari chose to take the Queensboro Bridge and maneuver through the streets of Queens to get to the Long Island Expressway and then the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Clearly, the way to get to LaGuardia, tolls aside, is either (a) the Queens-Midtown Tunnel or (b) the F.D.R. Drive up to the Triborough Bridge. Arcari disagreed. “The F.D.R. Drive can be hit or miss,” he said. “At times, in the middle of the day, I have sat there for extended periods.” Perhaps, but after merging onto the B.Q.E. we sat there for extended periods as well.

As we inched forward, we began to talk of our favorite and least favorite road segments. Whatever our differences, we agreed that the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a deep, eternally sluggish river of brake lights and diesel exhaust coursing through a waste of twisted rebar and abandoned scrap, is as gruesome a stretch of highway as exists in these parts. Its horrors, however, are invisible to the likes of MapQuest.

Eventually, we pulled into a gas station near the airport. Singh and Arcari mounted a G.P.S. antenna, shaped like a giant mushroom, on the roof of the car, and connected a laptop to it, upon which a map would show our progress, a G.P.S. track “like a birdseed trail.” Though we were within rocket-launcher distance of the runways and were assembling some suspicious-looking hardware, no one paid us any mind.

Singh bought a Red Bull and took the wheel. Arcari sat in back with the laptop, ready to note any changes in what they called the “geometry” of the roads.

“Whenever you’re ready, Shovie,” he said.

The first thing the men noticed was a “No Left Turn” sign out of the gas station. “That doesn’t go in the database,” Arcari said. “That’s unofficial geometry, since it pertains to a private enterprise.”

An analyst has some leeway in proposing recon missions in his territory. “The situation at LaGuardia was something I had noticed myself and thought should be revisited,” Arcari explained. In his free time, he’d been driving past the airport and, nudged by curiosity, if not conscience, had made a little detour, discovering that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport, had put up a few new road signs. This was the situation at LaGuardia.

“We’ll circle around the perimeter and then check the terminals,” Arcari said. “As we’re driving, I’m checking our geometry against what exists in reality.” Left on Runway Drive (“drop a name check”), merge onto LaGuardia Road (another name check), left onto Delta Arrivals Road. The sign for it was new. “A valid unnamed feature,” Arcari said, turning the laptop so that I could follow along as he recorded it onscreen. “I point an arrow to where the feature occurred.” A few hundred yards along, there was another new sign: “East End Rd.” Its short-lived existence as mere reality had come to an end; it was geometry now.

Seeing the road through the eyes of a ground-truther made it seem a thicket of signage—commands and designations vying for attention, like a nightmare you might have after a day of studying for a driving exam. Once you start looking for attributes, you spot them everywhere.

“Why don’t we loop around again?” Arcari said. “I want to be sure we collected everything correctly.”

The familiar frustration of going around and around on an airport road was ameliorated by the fact that no one was lost or late. After the extra orbit, we drove into Astoria, the neighborhood next to the airport. Arcari approached the neighborhood as a Zamboni would a sheet of ice, driving around the outside of the “project area,” and then going up and down the streets within it. He observed that, driving around like this, you become acutely aware of how many people are not at work. Arcari said that one of the issues that have come up in New York in recent years is the naming of streets and squares for the victims of the September 11th attacks. We came upon one of them, James Marcel Cartier Way, and Arcari was pleased to see that the name was in the database. A kind of contentment took hold, as other anomalies encountered along the way—an unlikely median strip, a “Do Not Enter” sign—turned out to be accounted for. “This should be a two-way. O.K. Good.”

Over lunch at a local diner, we discussed various attribute incidents. “One item that was an issue: on the B.Q.E., they started renumbering the exits. They did some but didn’t do others, so for a while there were two Exit 41s.”

After lunch, Arcari and Singh were due back at the central office, in Syosset, to download their findings. They offered to drive me back into Manhattan, but we agreed that it would make more sense for me to take the subway. None of us knew where to find it, though. Subway stations are not attributes; Navteq honors the primacy of the automobile, promulgated by the makers of road maps of a century ago, whose mandate was to promote auto travel and, with it, the purchase of gasoline, cars,

Kết quả (Việt) 1:

Trong thế kỷ 15, Henry Navigator, một hoàng tử Bồ Đào Nha, chủ trì một tòa án tại Sagres đã trở thành một trung tâm cho cartographers, các nhà sản xuất nhạc cụ và nhà thám hiểm, cuộc thám hiểm mà ông tài trợ. Seafarers quay trở về Sagres từ bờ biển phía tây châu Phi báo cáo phát hiện của họ, và bản đồ mới được chế tạo, mở rộng nhiệt trên thế giới được biết đến, mà trong những ngày đó đã không đi ra ngoài Cape Verde. Các bản đồ này đã trở thành rất có giá trị, do của tiện ích trong thương mại, chiến tranh, và linh hồn-tiết kiệm, và đã được ganh tị bảo vệ như là bí mật nhà nước.Tương đương với latter-day là một công ty được gọi là Navteq. Đó là các nhà cung cấp hàng đầu của các dữ liệu địa lý để lập bản đồ web và ngành công nghiệp cá nhân điều hướng-phòng nồi hơi của doanh nghiệp where-you-are-and-what-to-do. Đối thủ cạnh tranh chỉ thực sự là một công ty Bỉ được gọi là Tele Atlas. Hầu hết các trang Web, nhà sản xuất xe hơi và các nhà sản xuất gizmo-bất cứ ai tham gia vào những gì được gọi là hệ thống giao thông vận tải thông minh-nhận được số lượng lớn của nguyên liệu từ hai công ty. Các khách hàng khác nhau chủ yếu là ở cách thức họ chọn để hiển thị các dữ liệu. Điều này cho phép các thường dân để có sở thích. Ví dụ, ở tại "Saturday Night Live" mô hình-rap video "Lười biếng chủ nhật" hai người tìm kiếm "các dopest tuyến đường" từ West Village để Upper West Side xem xét sử dụng Yahoo! Maps:"Tôi thích MapQuest!""Đó là tốt nhất, quá.""Google Maps là tốt nhất.""True dat.""Đôi thật!"Mặc dù số hóa của bản đồ và các vệ tinh xoay quanh trái đất, cuộc cách mạng lập vẫn còn dựa chủ yếu trên những quan sát tươi được thực hiện bởi người. NAVTEQ, như Hoàng tử Henry, sản xuất các bản Cập Nhật theo định kỳ (thường là bốn lần một năm) cho khách hàng doanh nghiệp. Thám hiểm của nó là các nhà phân tích địa lý, công việc mà là để đi vào con đường để đảm bảo rằng tất cả mọi thứ mà nó nói về những con đường thật — để kiểm tra các tuyến đường cũ và ghi lại những cái mới. Các thực hành được gọi là mặt đất-truthing. Họ lái xe xung quanh và hãy lưu ý của những gì họ gọi là "thuộc tính," bất cứ điều gì có ý nghĩa đối với một khách du lịch tìm kiếm theo cách của mình. Một phân đoạn đường có thể có thuộc tính một trăm sáu mươi, tất cả mọi thứ từ một giới hạn tốc độ một drawbridge, một trên đoạn đường nối, hoặc một lệnh cấm chống lại U-turns. Dấu hiệu mới, đường mới, mới lối thoát hiểm nhất, quy tắc mới: nếu thay đổi như vậy đi uncollected do Navteq, khách du lịch, dựa trên một thiết bị hoặc một bản đồ được sản xuất bởi một trong số khách hàng của Navteq, cũng có thể nhận được bị mất hoặc nhầm lẫn đủ để được "phù hợp đơn xin tị nạn của Muldoon," như những cuốn sách nhỏ Jones Live-đồ đặt nó, trong một sự thừa nhận đầu của nỗi đau đớn của bị mất trong một ô tô. ("Nó là của mình cho Phường bạo lực, thẳng và chắc chắn.") Một trình điều khiển làm cho một đơn giản để lại biến — nói, từ Broadway lên bốn mươi giây Street — gặp một blizzard của thuộc tính: một chiều, tăng tốc độ giới hạn, crosswalk, đèn giao thông, dấu hiệu đường phố, biến hạn chế, hai chiều, vòi.NAVTEQ có khoảng sáu trăm nhà nghiên cứu lĩnh vực và văn phòng trong 23 quốc gia. Có chín lĩnh vực nhà nghiên cứu trong vùng đô thị New York. Một buổi sáng mùa thu này, tôi đã đi với một cặp của họ, Chris Arcari và Shovie Singh. Họ đã chọn tôi trên bốn mươi-second Street, trong một màu trắng S.U.V., sau khi thực hiện mà unextraordinary rời khỏi Broadway. "Chúng tôi sẽ được làm việc trên LaGuardia Airport," Arcari nói. "Một trong những mặt hàng mà chúng tôi cần phải kiểm tra là một số tên đường phố. Họ đã đưa ra dấu hiệu mới. Sau đó chúng tôi sẽ tiến tới một khu vực mà chúng tôi đã nhắm mục tiêu." Arcari, những người là ba mươi bảy và đã được đưa lên Long Island, là thành viên cao cấp của đội, và ông có xu hướng để nói chuyện theo cách chính thức, uyển khúc ngư pháp của một sĩ quan cảnh sát chứng tại tòa án. Ông đã với Navteq trong mười năm. Singh, một bản địa của Trinidad người lớn lên tại Queens, là một thuê mới. Ông đã nhận được nối vào địa lý sau khi uống một số lớp học trong các chủ đề trong trường cao đẳng.They were, you might say, free-driving—no navigation device or map—being not only locals but also professionals in the arcane and endlessly fascinating tri-state-area discipline of getting from here to there. They spend two to three days a week just driving around. Manhattan’s grid may be the easiest road network to master in the developed world (if we overlook the nuances), yet the routes leading to and from it are as tricky as the tributaries of the Amazon. (One of the things you notice, as you approach New York City, is that there are almost no signs saying “Manhattan.” Instead, the traveller is introduced to such notions as “Mosholu” and “Major Deegan.”) The highways are a mad thatch of interstates, parkways, boulevards, and spurs, plus river crossings galore, each with its own virtues and idiosyncrasies. There are many ways to get from point A to point B in New York, and, because of all the permutations, anyone can be a route-selection expert, or at least an enthusiast. Family gatherings inevitably feature a clutch of relatives eating cocktail nuts and arguing over the merits of various exits and shortcuts. So it was that I found myself muttering a bit when Arcari chose to take the Queensboro Bridge and maneuver through the streets of Queens to get to the Long Island Expressway and then the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Clearly, the way to get to LaGuardia, tolls aside, is either (a) the Queens-Midtown Tunnel or (b) the F.D.R. Drive up to the Triborough Bridge. Arcari disagreed. “The F.D.R. Drive can be hit or miss,” he said. “At times, in the middle of the day, I have sat there for extended periods.” Perhaps, but after merging onto the B.Q.E. we sat there for extended periods as well.As we inched forward, we began to talk of our favorite and least favorite road segments. Whatever our differences, we agreed that the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a deep, eternally sluggish river of brake lights and diesel exhaust coursing through a waste of twisted rebar and abandoned scrap, is as gruesome a stretch of highway as exists in these parts. Its horrors, however, are invisible to the likes of MapQuest.Eventually, we pulled into a gas station near the airport. Singh and Arcari mounted a G.P.S. antenna, shaped like a giant mushroom, on the roof of the car, and connected a laptop to it, upon which a map would show our progress, a G.P.S. track “like a birdseed trail.” Though we were within rocket-launcher distance of the runways and were assembling some suspicious-looking hardware, no one paid us any mind.Singh bought a Red Bull and took the wheel. Arcari sat in back with the laptop, ready to note any changes in what they called the “geometry” of the roads.“Whenever you’re ready, Shovie,” he said.The first thing the men noticed was a “No Left Turn” sign out of the gas station. “That doesn’t go in the database,” Arcari said. “That’s unofficial geometry, since it pertains to a private enterprise.”An analyst has some leeway in proposing recon missions in his territory. “The situation at LaGuardia was something I had noticed myself and thought should be revisited,” Arcari explained. In his free time, he’d been driving past the airport and, nudged by curiosity, if not conscience, had made a little detour, discovering that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport, had put up a few new road signs. This was the situation at LaGuardia.“We’ll circle around the perimeter and then check the terminals,” Arcari said. “As we’re driving, I’m checking our geometry against what exists in reality.” Left on Runway Drive (“drop a name check”), merge onto LaGuardia Road (another name check), left onto Delta Arrivals Road. The sign for it was new. “A valid unnamed feature,” Arcari said, turning the laptop so that I could follow along as he recorded it onscreen. “I point an arrow to where the feature occurred.” A few hundred yards along, there was another new sign: “East End Rd.” Its short-lived existence as mere reality had come to an end; it was geometry now.Seeing the road through the eyes of a ground-truther made it seem a thicket of signage—commands and designations vying for attention, like a nightmare you might have after a day of studying for a driving exam. Once you start looking for attributes, you spot them everywhere.“Why don’t we loop around again?” Arcari said. “I want to be sure we collected everything correctly.”The familiar frustration of going around and around on an airport road was ameliorated by the fact that no one was lost or late. After the extra orbit, we drove into Astoria, the neighborhood next to the airport. Arcari approached the neighborhood as a Zamboni would a sheet of ice, driving around the outside of the “project area,” and then going up and down the streets within it. He observed that, driving around like this, you become acutely aware of how many people are not at work. Arcari said that one of the issues that have come up in New York in recent years is the naming of streets and squares for the victims of the September 11th attacks. We came upon one of them, James Marcel Cartier Way, and Arcari was pleased to see that the name was in the database. A kind of contentment took hold, as other anomalies encountered along the way—an unlikely median strip, a “Do Not Enter” sign—turned out to be accounted for. “This should be a two-way. O.K. Good.”Over lunch at a local diner, we discussed various attribute incidents. “One item that was an issue: on the B.Q.E., they started renumbering the exits. They did some but didn’t do others, so for a while there were two Exit 41s.”After lunch, Arcari and Singh were due back at the central office, in Syosset, to download their findings. They offered to drive me back into Manhattan, but we agreed that it would make more sense for me to take the subway. None of us knew where to find it, though. Subway stations are not attributes; Navteq honors the primacy of the automobile, promulgated by the makers of road maps of a century ago, whose mandate was to promote auto travel and, with it, the purchase of gasoline, cars,