In many small and medium-sized towns of the Inland Northwest of the United States, it’s common to see small businesses catering to the local Latino community. These include tiendas, restaurants, clothing boutiques, stylists, auto services, and more. We tried to find out the degree to which these businesses are showing up in digital mapping platforms. Are they included at the same rate as other businesses? This is an important question, since most Americans find businesses through online searches, and these queries are almost always connected to maps.
We studied four map platforms (Apple Maps, Bing Maps, Google Maps, and OpenStreetMap) in four cities of the Inland Northwest with high Latino populations (Wenatchee, Yakima, Pasco, and Caldwell). In each city, we performed a ground survey of active businesses on a sampling of streets, followed by a “digital survey” of points of interest present in the four mapping platforms. Using academic literature and the guidance of community members, we classified the businesses and compared the ground and digital surveys to determine the rate of mapping.
It turns out that although many online maps appear full of data, they are missing many active businesses, and are cluttered with many other defunct businesses. Latino-oriented local businesses appeared in the maps significantly less often than other businesses, but this was true for all local businesses when compared with national chains. Areas of town with relatively high Latino populations tended to have more local businesses in them, resulting in less complete maps in these neighborhoods.
Inclusion of Latino-oriented local businesses in OpenStreetMap (OSM) was low in these cities, but we learned that several of the contributors who did add these businesses were doing so as part of an educational exercise. OSM mapping events with students might be useful for reaching areas not typically mapped in detail. At the conclusion of the project, we supervised the addition of all our ground survey data into OpenStreetMap by a student. This was intended as a service to the communities and businesses we examined.
The entire report, with many more results, is available in an open-access journal article at the following link: