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Transcript: "The Doctor Will See You Now"
BBC TechLife 2025-03-06

**[Mapping Segment]**



**Speaker 0:** Let's stay with The United States for a moment. As one of his first orders of business, newly elected US president Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to officially recognize the Gulf Of Mexico as the Gulf Of America. Google and Apple have both made the change for US users. All of this got Techlife's Ben de Rico thinking, how do the names on our digital maps get there? Ben's been looking into this and joins me in the studio.

Hi, Ben. So tell us, you've spent some time looking into this, and it's not as simple as you'd think. What have you learned?

**Speaker 8**: Yeah. First, it's probably a good idea to start referring to the maps on apps like Google Maps not as a single map, but as an app with lots and lots of maps inside of it. Google says that over a billion people access Google Maps every month in about 220 countries. So that's a lot of places and names to keep straight. Right?

And as we've seen, those names can change. This time, it's a big international body of water, but businesses close and new ones open, roads get new names, and staying on top of all that is a really big task. So let's work from big to small. Google said in a thread on x that the company has, quote, a long standing practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources, end quotes. In the case of The United States, that's a service run by the US Geological Survey called the Geographic Names Information System or GNIS for short.

So that system updated in mid February, and now US users see Gulf Of America. They also see Mount Denali in Alaska, the highest peak in North America, changed from its indigenous name back to Mount McKinley as it was known from 1915 to 2015.

**Speaker 0:** So the map that you see in Google Maps is going to be informed by where you are. The local name will be what's displayed on the map?

**Speaker 8:** Exactly. And that's, generally speaking, gonna be determined by what your government says it's called, which, you know, poses some problems. There are lots of places around the world that are contested. Think of Kashmir or Cyprus. One group may say they're in control of an area while their neighbor says the exact same thing, and each may have their own name for that area.

So what happens in the map apps? Well, at least for Google, the government designation where the person is is what's likely to be displayed. But for international users, not in either place, they'll probably see two names. That means Tech Life listeners currently in Europe, Asia, or Africa will likely see two names over the Gulf, Gulf Of America and in parentheses, Gulf Of Mexico or the other way around. You can actually see this in a few other places around the planet right now too, of course, depending where you are.

A good example is the body of water in between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In The US and here in The UK, it displays as Persian Gulf with Arabian Gulf below it in parentheses. But if you're in Saudi Arabia or some of the other countries in the Arabian Peninsula, it'll be the other way around. Arabian Gulf with Persian Gulf in parentheses.

**Speaker 0:** So large apps generally use official sources for big names, but it still knows the names of small country lane, a local hospital, or a small business that's just popped up. Where does that information come from?

**Speaker 8:** Well, Google has a program called Maps Content Partners. This system allows trusted public sources, think universities, real estate developers, NGOs, to submit information to Google to include in their maps. This could include something big, like a street name or the city limits, or the names of crucial infrastructure, like hospitals or fire stations. They also say that machine learning models are being used to extract information from images on Google Street View to verify addresses and street name changes as they happen.

**Speaker 0:** Does everyone do it this way, or are there other approaches?

**Speaker 8:** Yeah. So I spoke to **Minh Nguyen** a software engineer and volunteer with a group that has a different approach called OpenStreetMaps. Rather than depend on government and official sources, OpenStreetMaps is a volunteer run, open source map data system.

**Minh Nguyen**: You know, if you think about how something like Google Maps works, it's, you know, it's it's operated by a company. It's just one of their services. They have employees, you know, kind of tending to the map. But OpenStreetMap is very different. It's it's, first of all, not a corporate project at all.

It is, first and foremost, a volunteer grassroots effort. There's a nonprofit foundation backing it, but it's just thousands and thousands of contributors who, you know, have found the project and contribute their free time. You know, you may have heard of opportunities to contribute to Google Google Maps by providing feedback and things like that, but it's important to know that that's just feedback. And OpenStreetMap is a very, like, much more democratized kind of, approach to map making.

**Speaker 0:** That's all from Tech Life for now, but you can find us here again next week. Remember to let us know what you think of today's edition or something you'd like to hear in a future show. Our email address is techlife@bbc.c0.uk, or you can WhatsApp us on 443301230320.

Let us know your name and where you live. Today's Tech Life was produced by Tom Quinn, edited by Monica Soriano, and presented by me, Graham Fraser.