The Dutch mapmaker AND (Automotive Navigation Data) has just released navigation mapping data for all of North America. The digital map covers more than 11.5 million kilometers of roads and streets, and includes house numbers, boundaries of countries, states and urban areas, as well as lakes, rivers and other water bodies.
AND maps are being used throughout the world for navigation and location-based services, with its primary market in Western Europe. The company lists ESRI, IBM, Garmin, Google, MapInfo, Microsoft, Nokia, and PTV as their primary clients.
This movement into the North American market comes at a time when LBS is seeing strong growth, but also at a time when the free open source OpenStreetMap is being adopted as the basemap of Mapquest, and Google is moving away from licensing commercial geospatial data and instead creating their own. It will be interesting to see the uptake of the AND data in Internet mapping world.
