This such a disappointing article it borders on journalistic dishonesty. They make out Belarus to be some Terra Incognita being discovered by some brave Nokia volunteer(?) explorers. It is simply not the case, Nokia's competitors in mapping space, Google and OpenStreetMap already have excellent maps. Just compare maps of Zhodzina, a provincial Belarusian town I chose at random between Bing (Nokia)[1] , Google [2], and OpenStreetMap [3]. Nokia's map is hole, whereas Google and OSM have streets and names associates with them. This pattern follows from Minsk to the provinces.

The details offered by the article may be of some interest, but their veracity simply can not be trusted due to glaring omissions, half truths, and down right falsehoods in the article on the broad level. Shame, shame, shame on NY Times.

[1] http://binged.it/14p2lTY [2] https://www.google.com/maps?q=Zhodzina,+Minsk+Province,+Bela... [3] http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/54.1038/28.3231

Students collecting geo-data to improve the mapping of their local area, and donating it to a single corporate entity in a way that neither competing corporate entities nor free culture projects can use. Hmm.

Also, this puff piece is about Nokia's Here maps, yet when I go to their website (or Bing) Belarus is an empty wasteland. But in Google maps and OSM, there's an incredible amount of detail. So what problem where they attempting to solve? They seem to be claiming the government is to blame for the problem, but that doesn't seem to have held Google back.

edit: and on the mention of OSM, I have noticed that the amount of OSM contributers who are Russian-speaking has exploded recently. Looking at the comparison between OSM and Nokia/Navteq maps in the area I can now understand why.

> ... that doesn't seem to have held Google back.

To the contrary. Google's map data in Belarus also comes from volunteers. For all we know, most of the volunteers who supplied the data for Google Maps and OpenStreetMap may also be working on Nokia Maps now.

The problem they are attempting to solve is that Nokia maps does not have Belarus map data. The fact that Google and OSM have that data is useless to Nokia, and to all GPS device companies that license from Nokia.

The incentive for these volunteers is that in a few years, they'll be able to tell a visitor, "Just enter the address into your GPS," knowing that it'll work. If they supplied the map data only to OSM and withheld it from commercial organizations like Google and Nokia, then they won't be able to accomplish that.

Open Street Maps seems to have pretty detailed data of Belarus.

>>In countries where geographic borders are in dispute — like India and Pakistan, which are at odds over demarcation of the Kashmir region — Nokia has produced separate digital maps for each country, with each version displaying that country’s preferred border.

Does google maps or openstreet map follow similar strategies? I always wondered how issues like these were handled as they are so complicated for a single organization to deal with.

Google maps and OSM show both the borders. For an India focused website I am currently working on, I went with jvectormap for this reason ( it is just a map to show cities and towns as points ) - http://www.ruralindiaonline.org/map/

TomTom has this as well. The core map contains something called "disputed border". It's up to the manufacturer licensing the map to use this attribution of course.

OpenStreetMap have pretty good data, actually, not just for Belarus, but also all sorts of areas in the ex-USSR where google/apple/nokia can only manage a blank space, or a 1 point per 10km vector road. Saved my bacon repeatedly while rallying across that neck of the woods, and you can very easily load OSM data into a garmin or whatever.

Edit: looks like google have been making lots of headway in this area too - https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=rostov+on+don&data=!4... - this time last year, there was only one road in Rostov, according to them, and it was dead straight. Made navigating fun, as I failed to get the OSM tile for the area, as it was an unplanned side-trip.