Trap Street

The English term Trap Street ( German about: Fall road ' ) refers to a street in maps, atlases and spatial information, which is not present in the field, but was invented by the card manufacturer as plagiarism case.

Purpose

Trap Streets serve the copy protection of geo-information by presenting a kind of watermark. If the protected card is unjustified copied, digitized, or corrupted, it can be shown by imaginary lines again and again where the data originated. Since these roads do not exist in reality, can be identified without doubt the original author. Especially with the ease of copying of digital spatial data are the providers of such records before the issue of the protection of their intellectual property. However, since you can change the road network shown is not arbitrarily without affecting too much the functions of navigation systems, the invented roads are usually placed as dead ends or footpaths in remote areas. A similar approach, many publishers of address and phone books, by incorporating fictitious entries.

Examples

• In a Greek Road Atlas of the City of Athens potential plagiarists are warned that in the work invented roads are included on the book cover.
• In the BBC's Map Man was confirmed on 17 October 2005 by a spokesman for the Geographer 's A- Z Street Atlas Companies that approximately 100 fictitious streets in the London edition contained their road atlases.
• In August 2007, was discovered on a map of the city of Oxford (Oxford A-Z street map ) is a fictional street that bears the name GOY CL. The name of the impasse was not in the street directory and place there is no road.
• Only in Google Maps and Google Earth, there was some time the place Argleton (53 ° 33 ' N, 2 ° 55' W53.543 - 2912 ) in England. Whether it actually was a plagiarism case, but is still unclear. Meanwhile, Google has repaid the place of its virtual map.
• Exclusively in digital maps which are based on data from the card provider Navteq, such as the City Navigator maps for Garmin navigation systems or those of the Internet map service Bing Maps, you can find the street 'Am Cherry Orchard ' in Erpolzheim. Indeed there and there was never a road in the town with that name. In Aerial view obviously located at the site of alleged street an acreage.
• Also just in Navteq maps are available in the German town of Friedrichshafen, the ' dead end '. In fact, it is in this alley to a dead end, but in reality she is wearing no name.