Map Making in your language on your website
February 20th, 2009 | Published in Google Earth
Over the last 7 months, map makers around the world have been busy mapping their locales using Google Map Maker. From Chile to Vietnam Google Map Makers added cities, villages, lakes, roads and businesses to the map. The resulting maps in 164 countries are some of the best ever seen for these regions.
We've taken another step in providing easy access to these maps by making Map Maker maps available in the Google Maps API and as static maps. If you have a Google Maps mashup that is primarily used in one of these countries or you simply want to embed a map in your blog post or web page, you can now serve these maps that are updated every day by switching a parameter in the API. Here's an example of the Map Maker static map of Reykjavik, Iceland (on the left) compared with what you will get from a vanilla static map (on the right). For reference, the URL used to generate this map is: http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=64.14607,-21.945148&zoom=14&size=512x512&maptype=mapmaker-roadmap&key=MAPS_API_KEY&sensor=false
For more details on how to use these maps, see the Google Geo Developers Blog.
For more details on how to use these maps, see the Google Geo Developers Blog.
If all you want is to view the updated maps in Google Maps, you can now add this Mapplet to Google Maps and view the latest and greatest from the community.
Many Voices
Many Voices
Also keeping with our mission of making the world's geographic information universally accessible and useful, we are proud to announce that Google Map Maker is now available in 27 languages at mapmaker.google.com. This represents the primary or second language of more than a half billion people in the 164 countries covered by Google Map Maker.
Users can already add data in every language supported by your keyboard; simply switch to that language on your keyboard and start typing. For example if users name a road in two languages, we will render it in both languages - here is one such place in Pakistan.
Lastly, if you can't find your native language in this list, worry not! We've opened the Map Maker interface for translation to any language using the Google in Your Language program.