Do you know how it works when highways have exits added or a town changes a two way street to a one way street or any other change to a roadway? Is anybody responsible for getting that new information to the GPS companies? Thanks for any insight you have.
Honestly, I used to "in the good old days", but with the smartphone designers driving (pun intended) the business model, how data gets from the ground to your mapping app seems to be more efficient now than it ever was. But, with caveats...
First, a short story, US-based. My first engineering job was with Tri-Met, serving the Portland tri-county area, and my first office was a block away from the "Metro" office - part of Metro's function was/is to collect, process, and resell GIS data. Metro serves as a collector, overseeing entity, and dispenser of data - which you could "rent" per quarter on DVDs (now, a quarterly subscription). You could get roadway, aerial, crime, population data - or all of it, for a fee. Within Metro, there are counties, cities, townships that collect data - generally through a county surveyor's office, to which final data is submitted by registered engineers & surveyors. Then, there's agency maintenance to be performed by agency or agency-hired consultants - and changes are documented, which are also submitted to the county surveyor's office. There's often communication between a county surveyor's office and an entity like Metro, but often the county surveyor's office is the final stop for data. State and Federal highways/freeways/tollways are the purview and responsibility of a state's DOT (department of transportation) - of which I have worked on as well.
So, all of that is a short list of "owners". Each structure - a bridge, roadway, highway, interstate highway, intersection, signal, sidewalk, pathway, railroad, retaining wall - "belongs" to some agency or entity, responsible for its maintenance and liability. Yes, there's more to it than this so far. I've set more brass tacks and survey stakes and checked more earthwork cut sheets and material spec sheets than I care to admit...
A company like Apple creates a product - Maps. Maps sells iPhones. You and I own an iPhone. There's your cash pile. Apple, in turn, pays TomTom, who owns Teleatlas, who buys data from Metro - that's where your data comes from. It's Apple's job to "skin" the data and/or buy what they need to keep its iPhone users happy (for a skin example see
http://snazzymaps.com/tag/light).
Then there's Google, which bought data from companies like Teleatlas and Navteq. Apple is likely finding out now what Google did a few years ago - Teleatlas and Navteq had a stranglehold on the mapping data business and were charging huge amounts of money for data that wasn't getting updated very often. Keep in mind that "stuff" that's wrong on your iPhone Maps app likely has been wrong for years, before there even was an iPhone or Galaxy handset. There may have been additional conditions place upon Apple and/or Google - much of this data exchange would have been one-way - "we lease you data, you give us money", or something like that. So, Google hired a bunch of drivers.
The failure of errors is that an error can take months to be "certified" and fed up the system. I believe - literally - that Google tired of the cronyism of the old mapping system, and now Apple is finding out the same thing that Google did a few years ago - it's hard to map something out accurately, and much harder to maintain that map.
And, there's no responsibility by agencies as you're citing it to Apple or Google. An agency's responsibility is to their facilities and their users - that's pretty much it. An entity that collects and repackages data, like Metro - has a dedicated web page and staff member to contact and process sales of their data. Metro makes periodic updates - but keep in mind that some of the subsets of data do not get updated on that cycle - they may add changes to or new roadways, but they haven't updated their aerial data since 2011 because developers haven't made any recent flyovers of note AFAIK.
And, AFAIK, it would be Apple's responsibility to pick up the phone, call a DOT and ask if there's any changes to a roadway. Most DOTs are laying off staff since there hasn't been a Federal transportation bill passed in some time, so I can offer that there isn't a person that answers to Apple/MS/Google! So, Apple/Google/MS partner with a traffic reporting entity like Sigalert or INRIX to report closures/accidents/maintenance issues - and Sigalert/INRIX DO work with DOTs and roadway owners for these issues. AFAIK, both Google and Apple rely on Sigalert - I see exactly the same exact reporting errors on Google Maps and Apple Maps, and, of course, Google adds some of Waze data to their mapping.
County departments have also been cut back. A subdivision gets built, and so many are platted around September/October before the rainy season starts. The survey department processes the data in house, and a CAD tech gets to digitizing the data weeks later, reviewed and certified by the county weeks after that. It might be weeks to months later before that data is available for sale. And, navigation manufacturers often make their "updates" available in October of each year - so, guess what? - like every year for as long as I can recall it's often last year's subdivision or roadway changes that makes it into your car's nav system. It's this kind of data collecting/publishing cycle that drives end users nuts. But Teleatlas didn't care for years - as a EU-based company, where roads and properties don't change like they do in NA, it's not such a big deal for non-NA customers.
I used to use a TomTom GO 910 - which also had a traffic reporting service based on Teleatlas data before TomTom wrote that check to buy them. My Benz GL450 and Forester XT both use Teleatlas in their navigation systems - and, they all showed so many errors I just gave up. Here in OR/WA/ID so many "roads" are actually gated logging roads that are closed to the public. I'd bet that my really old 910 would still work very well in Austria or France.
Apple and Google have adapted by hiring their own staffs, creating their own reporting system, and skinning data so that it works for most of us end users. The next challenge for them is get their parsing and POI engines cleaned up (I'm not going there today).
