I used to work for NavTech. I knew they invest a lot ...including pay me a good money for several years.

Well, no mater how big NavTech invested (now 49% owned by Holland Philips Corp), they only have 1100 employees world-wide worked for the past 10 years (the actually man-hour working on the map is actually much lower).

Think about the process I purpose involved any body who has a GPS enabled Java/.Net portable platform. And these kind of device is becoming so popular (Spring PCS now sells the GPS Java phone for $139. Samsung). It could mean 10X or even 1000X man-power for collecting the data. With a proper AI based data collection and verification process software. It is very possible to come up with the same quality of map quickly in the future (with even more feature enriched GIS data in the same database). Think about how Linux got created and now its quality is comparable, or even beter than to the major UNIX releases. This one could be the same or much easier...

-cpu