Telcontar has announced that it can now support Chinese maps through NAVTEQ’s Chinese joint venture NAV2 with its DDS product. DDS (Drill Down Server) is used by companies to handle their mapping and routing needs. This is potentially big news for their clients Yahoo! and Google (or maybe not) as they can expand their presence in this fast growing and potentially lucrative market.
Licensing this data is difficult. The Chinese government controls the map data for its country. They are increasingly granting licenses to companies, but these companies must be majority Chinese owned, thus the need for a joint venture. The data also has distortions built into it that require a decoder to remove. Telcontar has also had to “include support for Chinese characters, the ability to look up streets and points of interests and most especially, the ability to conduct landmark-based navigation — which is the preferred method of navigation in China as many streets are not identified by name.” The coverage is focused on population centers, but will soon begin to expand along main linkages and highways.
(Disclosure: I have done consulting for Telcontar)