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SCMP Reporter

Hainan is in Japan, Guangzhou is in South Korea and Tiananmen is in Shanghai. The Great Wall is south of the Yangtze River, and there's a new London suburb called Unk. 
China's answer to Google Maps, launched last week after years of effort and months of test runs, is throwing up some unexpected results.
If users of Tianditu, or Map World, are patient enough to provide specifics about the destinations they are searching for or to scroll through the many options the service throws up in response to a search, they may eventually find the right answers.
But that is far short of what its developer boasts it can do. The State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping says Tianditu is superior to other digital maps such as Google's,  and offers more timely, accurate and complete geographical information about China to help people find places and plan their travels.
Bureau deputy director Min Yiren said last week Tianditu  would make people's lives easier. Whatever your destination, it could help you locate nearby facilities such as ATMs, banks and toilets with ease, he said.
Dr Zhang Quan , an artificial intelligence researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Acoustics, said Tianditu must have flunked some of the most basic homework on data management.
If you're looking for Haining, Zhejiang, you will first be directed to Herning, Denmark. A search for Taiyuan, Shanxi, throws up Thai Nguyen, Vietnam, and if you look for Lanzhou, Gansu, you will be directed to Hiiraan, Somalia. 
Users seem to have a better chance of getting the correct result, at least for China, if they take the additional step of specifying whether the place they are seeking is a city, district or county. 
Min, of the mapping bureau, claimed Tianditu would serve the tourism sector. But if you look for the Great Wall, the first place Tianditu directs you is Xianning, Hubei . For those not familiar with the geographical complexities of central China, Xianning is south of the Yangtze River and is at least a two-hour flight away from any part of the Great Wall. 
The popularity of the Great Wall in China probably contributes to the problem. A search on Baidu Maps, a service of the mainland's leading internet search provider, shows more than a thousand locations in Beijing alone bear the name 'Great Wall'. 
Tianditu does not fare a lot better with a more recent landmark, the 'Bird's Nest' National Stadium built for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It does place the stadium in the national capital, but the first suggested match the service throws up is a pub near an old imperial garden in the city's Xicheng district. Its second suggested match is the correct one - the stadium in Chaoyang district.
If you search for Tiananmen, the central square in Beijing, you will first be directed to a Korean restaurant in Shanghai's Minxing district. 
Despite Tianditu's obvious deficiencies in handling domestic data properly, Min said it could help mainlanders plan overseas trips - with searches possible in both Chinese and English. 
However, Tianditu says the driving distance between Tokyo and Kyoto in Japan is zero kilometres; curiously, the trip requires 'about one minute'.
Tourists navigating around the United Kingdom using Tianditu may well get lost. A Tianditu search by UK newspaper The Guardian found towns purportedly in Britain that share the names of the Polish town of Ostrow Wielkopolski and of Bashmakova and Chishmy in Russia, as well as a new London neighbourhood of Unk on a bend in the  River Thames - one of 13 Unks it displays worldwide (Google Maps has three Unks, in Iraq and Iran).
Nevertheless, Tianditu does appear to have some political smarts. Unlike Google Maps, it can identify the Diaoyu Islands - those uninhabited dots in the East China Sea that Japan also claims, calling them the Senkakus.
Tianditu is based on GeoStar, a geographical information service (GIS) platform developed by a company owned by Wuhan  University. Professor Luo Xuenian  , from the university, said GeoStar was slow in comparison with  more advanced GIS platforms used by multinational companies such as Google.
'In a digital map service, the GIS platform processes raw data and has a central role like the CPU in a personal computer,' Luo said. 'Given the same hardware, a slow GIS platform can significantly slow down the user experience.'
Zhang, the artificial intelligence researcher, said a place in China and a place overseas could easily be distinguished with a tag if they had similar names. That was a matter of  standard data base management, he said.
Some in the mainland information technology sector have speculated that the central government launched Tianditu in an attempt to drive Google Maps  out of China.
The government has begun licensing  digital geographic information providers and  will soon blacklist unlicensed map sites.
Min said there was no competition between the government and domestic businesses such as Baidu Maps, because Tianditu's database would be free to all licensed businesses. Whether they will want to tap this free resource is another question.
Out ... by just 513km
The distance between Tokyo and Kyoto in Japan, according to Map World, is: 0km




China's mappers take on world and get lost