A Comparison of Feature Density for Large Scale Online Maps

Abstract

Large-scale maps, such as those provided by Google, Bing, and Mapbox, among others, provide users an important source of information about local environments. Comparing maps from these services helps to evaluate both the quality of the underlying spatial data and the process of rendering the data into a map. The feature and label density of three different mapping services was evaluated by making pairwise comparisons of large-scale maps for a series of randomly selected areas across three continents. For North America, it was found that maps from Google had consistently higher feature and label density than those from Bing and Mapbox. Google Maps also held an advantage in Europe, while maps from Bing were the most detailed in sub-Saharan Africa. Maps from Mapbox, which relies exclusively on data from OpenStreetMap, had the lowest feature and label density for all three areas.