Apple is purchacing a Canadian mapping company

It is not the first time Apple is purchasing a smaller local company to improve  mapping. There were at least three big purchases,   Placebase, C3 and Poly9. All of them helped Apple modernize its growing mapping and location services effort. Apple's maps leave a lot to be desired, so the company's PR managers claim: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

It has been reported recently that  that Apple has signed a deal with Locationary, a Canadian service which helps manage databases of location, cope with duplicate information and delete outdated entries.

It uses crowdsourcing and a federated data exchange platform called Saturn to collect, merge and continuously verify a massive database of information on local businesses around the world, solving one of location’s biggest problems: out-of-date information.

Not only does Locationary ensure that business listing data is positionally accurate (IE: the restaurant I searched for is where Apple said it would be), it ensures that it is temporally accurate as well (IE: the restaurant I searched for is still open for business and not closed for renovation or shuttered entirely).

Last September  Locationary CEO Grant Ritchie said things Apple needed to do to improve its Mapping services, obviously taking into account the specialization of his company. Apple apparently liked his advice.