47 Days After Independence, South Sudan Still Absent From Online Maps
4 min readJohn Tanza Mabusu is from Maridi, a town in South Sudan. But if you ask Google Maps, Bing, Mapquest or Yahoo Maps, Maridi is in Sudan.
After decades of civil war and violence, South Sudan declared its Independence on July 9. The U.S. Government and the United Nations have recognized South Sudan as an independent nation, but the overwhelming majority of Internet cartography has not.
Mabusu, a broadcast journalist who fled Sudan in 1991 and now lives in Washington, D.C., says he checks Google Maps every day to see whether it has recognized his country. Last week, he started a Change.org petition that he hopes will pressure Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and National Geographic to change their maps.
“Most people [from South Sudan] feel like they have no home and they have no sense of belonging. And so for them to have a new country…it is this huge, huge sense of celebration,” Mabsu says. “I thought that it is high time to put South Sudan on the map so that people know that this is a distinct nation. A nation with its own people.”
As early as July 14, Google spokespeople have been saying the company is in the process of making the update. The company updated Google Earth within a month, and has held “mapping events” that encourage locals to participate in creating accurate maps of South Sudan.
“That’s nice,” Mabusu says. “But I would still argue that it’s too late to start talking about that because since the 9th of July, if they were serious, we would have seen the signs of their work.”
It is easy to question the delay when, within hours of a report that rebel forces in Tripoli had taken control from Moammar Gaddafi, Google changed the name of the city’s Green Square to “Martyr’s Square” on its maps.
A Google spokesperson said nobody was available to discuss the South Sudan update over the phone, and spokespeople from Yahoo and Mapquest referred Mashable to their map supplier NAVTEQ, which also provides data for Bing’s maps.
NAVTEQ referred back to its customers. “NAVTEQ bases decisions to add a new country to our database on the needs of our customers to whom we license our data, as well as considering the overall business requirements at a given point in time,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
“Specifically regarding South Sudan – we are aware of this recent change and are currently assessing plans. It is also important to understand that once NAVTEQ makes a determination as to how our database update will be handled, our customers — who receive access to updated data on a quarterly basis — then determine if and when to make data available to their users.
“We pride ourselves on the quality of our map and make over 2 million changes to our database every day. NAVTEQ believes that our dedication to detailed planning before additions of this nature to our database ensures that we maintain our quality vision and best serve our customers, and ultimately the consumer.”
Violence between Sudan and South Sudan continues, and there are still a number of issues that could make drawing a definitive border difficult, including a contested region of the border called Abyei.
For other contested borders of the world, online maps have made due with dotted lines or other indications. The border between Egypt and Sudan, for instance, contains a dotted portion to indicate the disputed border triangle Halayeb on both Google’s and NAVTEQ’s maps. Google Earth uses a red line to show Abyei instead of the yellow lines that denote other borders.
What bothers Mabusu and other South Sudanese is that as of now, for reasons that haven’t been spelled out publicly, there is no indication of their country whatsoever on most Internet maps.
“As it is now, it is very, very confusing,” Mabusu says. “You would not know the difference. It looks like nothing happened.
http://mashable.com/2011/08/25/south-sudan-map/
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