OREANDA-NEWS. March 05, 2012. Yandex.Maps has integrated Public Map, a digital map created by its users, into the service. The mapping service now includes detailed plans of almost 400 cities across Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Crowdsourcing has allowed Yandex.Maps to add plans of such cities as Chita, Belgorod and Ulan-Ude, among many others.

Yandex.Maps now offers user-generated city plans for places as large as Moscow and as small as Taldom. Web users relied on their own knowledge of the area to create city plans with main roads, housing estates, parks and sports stadiums drawn over satellite images on the Public Map service. All of this user-generated content is available for search on Yandex.Maps. If the map for a city or town that the user is looking for is unavailable, the service returns a user-generated plan. Many cities on Yandex.Maps feature both professional maps and user-generated plans. Users can just enable the Public map layer on the service to view a crowdsourced plan displayed over a city map.

“Gerardus Mercator, a famous Flemish cartographer, born 500 years ago, invented the Mercator projection, which is being used for navigation to this day. In his time, cartographers had to rely mainly on travellers’ accounts and ancient texts. Today, anyone can make a map. If every Yandex.Maps user outlines on a satellite image at least their own apartment building, everyone will end up with an accurate, detailed city map,” says Pavel Guschin, Head of the Public Map service.

Any Yandex.Maps user can now contribute to the service. To add a street or even the whole city to a map on Yandex.Maps, the user can draw it on Public Map at n.maps.yandex.ru. Unless the addition is reported by other users as incorrect, in a couple of days it will appear on the map at the Yandex.Maps service.

The user-generated map is available both in the desktop version and in the Yandex.Maps for Mobile app. Website owners can embed the map into their sites using the Yandex.Maps API, as has already been done, for instance, by Magnitogorsk’s city portal and the city council of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.