Trap Street

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The English-language term trap street (German for example: 'Fallenstraße') describes a street shown in maps , atlases or geodata that in reality does not exist at all, but was deliberately drawn in the wrong way.

Trap Streets are mostly used by card manufacturers as plagiarism traps , but they can also be used for targeted disinformation for military or political reasons.

purpose

In particular, the simple ability to copy digital geospatial data poses the problem of protecting their intellectual property for providers of such data sets . Trap streets enable the detection of unauthorized copies by displaying a kind of watermark . If the information is simply copied, it can be assumed that the Trap Streets will also be copied. However, since these streets were invented for the respective source and do not appear in other maps or in reality, the source of the copied data can be clearly identified using the Trap Streets. In order to only marginally change the real road network shown on the map and not to influence the functionality of navigation systems too much, Trap Streets are usually placed as dead ends or footpaths in remote areas, where in the worst case scenario they are considered to be an error by the user, but none Cause navigation errors.

Publishers of address books and telephone books proceed in a similar manner by including invented entries in their directories.

As a means of disinformation , Trap Streets, but also fictional locations, were drawn on publicly accessible maps for military or political reasons. For example, in the Second World War , the Soviet Union deliberately leaked false maps to the military adversaries on which streets and towns were marked where only swamps and ravines existed.

Examples

In the middle of this vineyard in Erpolzheim, the street Am Kirschgarten runs on some digital maps
  • In a Greek street atlas of the city of Athens , potential plagiarists are warned on the book cover that the work contains invented streets.
  • In the BBC telecast Map It was on 17 October 2005 by a spokesman for the Geographer's A-Z Street Atlas company confirmed that about 100 fictional streets in London -Edition its road atlases are included.
  • In the 2007 Oxford A – Z street map , there was a fictitious street called Goy Close . The name of the impasse was not in the street directory and there is no street in the place.
  • Only in Google Maps and Google Earth did Argleton ( 53 ° 33 ′  N , 2 ° 55 ′  W ) exist in England for some time . However, it is still unclear whether this was actually a plagiarism trap. In the meantime, Google had erased the location from its virtual map.
  • A dead end at Am Kirschgarten in Erpolzheim can be found in digital maps based on data from the map supplier HERE (formerly Navteq ), e.g. B. the CityNavigator maps for Garmin navigation systems or those of the Internet map services Bing Maps or ADAC Maps - route planner, etc. In fact, there is or has never been such a road, at the corresponding point there is an inner-town wine-growing area.
  • In the same way there are entries for a fictional Princess-Sina-Milena-Strasse in map series and electronic navigation systems, the data of which can be traced back to the manufacturer HERE or Navteq , e.g. B. also in Map24 . The data sets for a number of German cities are affected, including Darmstadt, Erlangen, Münster (Geist), Osnabrück, Pforzheim, Schwerin (old town), Solingen and Zwickau.
  • The non-existent location of Agloe , New York was registered in Esso (or Exxon ) maps in the 1930s . Agloe plays an important role in the youth novel Margo's Footsteps by John Green.

See also

literature

  • Mark S. Monmonier: One in a million. The cartographers' tricks and lies. From the American by Doris Gerstner. Birkhäuser, Basel / Boston / Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-7643-5391-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dorothee Rätsch: Secret and forged cards. In: planet-wissen.de. Westdeutscher Rundfunk Cologne public law institution, November 6, 2014, accessed on September 20, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Αττική, Greek-language map book edited by Nik. & Ioan Fotis OE (Νικ. & Ιωάν. Φωτής Ο.Ε.), fotismaps.gr  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.fotismaps.gr  
  3. ↑ Blog entry about fictional street in Oxford
  4. ↑ Report of the Tagesschau online portal on the subject of Argleton ( Memento from April 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ^ Trap Street 'Am Kirschgarten' in Erpolzheim / Pfalz
  6. ↑ wdr.de
  7. ↑ blog.mcbachmann.de