Ok, this is strange....if I enter a street address in Mappoint 2002 or Mappoint 2004 they are displayed in exactly the same location on the map. However, if I enter lat/lon coordinates they are displayed in different locations between 2002 and 2004. Here is an example.

Lat 37.295840 Lon -120.478670

Street address: 65 W.14th St. Merced, CA 95340

Both 2002 and 2004 plot the street address the same but 2004 plots the lat/lon almost a block and a half away from the true location.

Any ideas? I've tried it on multiple machines, clean installs, up to date VB6 and Jet files....I can't believe this could be a Mappoint problem that hasn't been reported yet.

p.s. I spent a number of hours trying different addresses/cordinates and it appears to be much worse in the West/Southwest. East coast addresses/coordinates plotted accurately. Any ideas?

The streets might have shifted to bring them more in line with true GPS coordinates.. if I read the map right, the source for the data in both versions is GDT -- which compared to Navteq is generally known not to be as GPS-correct (but more complete in rural areas). So it would make sense that they corrected the streets to make them more correct in the later version.

If you have a need to be exact, one thing customers of GDT's data with a GIS might do is get a set of vector coordinates with the data updates to apply to their own layers to keep them in sync with GDT's data corrections. I don't think this is really an option with MapPoint, it's just not intended as a high-end platform.

Eric