openstreetmap

Scott Mor­ri­son post­ed a good arti­cle today in the Wall Street Jour­nal about our hire of Steve Coast, Open­StreetMap’s founder, and our announce­ment a week ago that we’d be shar­ing aer­i­al imagery with OSM.  Open­StreetMap, in case you don’t know, is a sort of Wikipedia for maps, con­tributed to by all, owned by all.  It’s been up since 2004.

Steve is a won­der­ful­ly cre­ative hack­er, both ide­al­is­tic and sar­don­ic.  (Maybe noth­ing sums the lat­ter up quite so per­fect­ly as his Fake May­or iPhone app, which spoofs the Foursquare “you’re the may­or” screen and might score you a free cap­puc­ci­no at some over­ly-wired cof­feeshop.)  In short, he’d be at home as a char­ac­ter in a Cory Doc­torow nov­el.  Hell, he prob­a­bly is a char­ac­ter in a Cory Doc­torow nov­el.

Like Steve (and Cory) I’m a fan of Cre­ative Com­mons.  When we released Pho­to­synth in 2008, we had sev­er­al CC options among the rights struc­tures selec­table for uploaded pho­tos, and short­ly after­ward I pre­vailed on our pro­gram man­agers and legal peo­ple to change the default to Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion, the most re-mix­able vari­ety.  I think it’s impor­tant for peo­ple to be aware and exer­cise choice in con­trol­ling the rights to their own data.  Most peo­ple who post media on the Web in a pub­lic forum don’t plan to sell or license those media.  In that case they should be encour­aged to share with each oth­er and with the world in a way that pre­vents the media from ever becom­ing a cor­po­ra­tion’s walled asset.  The CC-Attri­bu­tion and Share­Alike licens­es do that.

Short­ly after the Pho­to­synth release, I saw the beau­ti­ful “OSM 2008: A Year of Edits” video, an ani­ma­tion show­ing all of the con­tri­bu­tions to OSM over 2008.  It’s a lot bet­ter than it sounds.  Actu­al­ly, I remem­ber it sort of putting a lump in my throat at the time.  Eeri­ly, it reminds me a bit of volt­age-sen­si­tive dye neur­al imag­ing videos.  As if the Earth is a giant brain wiring itself up.

One of the things that’s excit­ing to me about OSM is the way it empow­ers grass­roots map­ping of places where there’s not enough eco­nom­ic incen­tive to pro­duce the sort of com­mer­cial maps Tele Atlas and Navteq spe­cial­ize in (and that Bing licens­es).  Major OSM projects took place last year in Haiti and in Kib­era, one of the biggest slums in the world (home to rough­ly 1M [cor­rec­tion from Mikel Maron in com­ments below: clos­er to 200k, see com­ments] peo­ple).  Even in the US, while the com­mer­cial providers have far more pre­cise and com­plete maps of the areas where peo­ple tend to nav­i­gate, OSM has a sur­pris­ing den­si­ty of small roads and paths in the wilder places, and details of foot­paths in parks.

We have a col­lab­o­ra­tion under­way with Dig­i­tal­Globe to do one of the largest aer­i­al imagery sur­veys ever under­tak­en, cov­er­ing the US and West­ern Europe at 30cm res­o­lu­tion.  (The cam­era we’re using to do this is an impres­sive tech­ni­cal achieve­ment, devel­oped by our Vex­cel team in Graz, Aus­tria.)  By shar­ing use of the imagery with the OSM com­mu­ni­ty, we hope to enable more OSM good­ness.  Maybe one day we can find a way to fund this kind of imag­ing over less devel­oped parts of the world.

Most of the OSM com­mu­ni­ty has respond­ed very pos­i­tive­ly, though there are a few of the usu­al anti‑M$FT trolls, like space­cube writ­ing

In my eyes OSM just sold its soul to the dev­il.

To be clear, OSM’s legal sta­tus is like a one-way valve– it’s free and open for­ev­er, and any edits made to it from any (legal) source become free and open too.  It can be used by any­body, but it can nev­er be “bought” or “owned” by any com­pa­ny.  If a trail over the Rock­ies can now be posi­tioned with 30cm accu­ra­cy by trac­ing over our aer­i­al imagery, that’s bad for OSM how exact­ly?

This is quite aside from the ques­tion of whether Microsoft can still be con­sid­ered the dev­il in the com­pa­ny of its younger brethren– maybe, but at most in an old fash­ioned, Rolling Stones sort of way.

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7 Responses to openstreetmap

  1. Pingback: OpenStreetMap Chile » Blog Archive » Bing nos da acceso a sus imágenes aéreas

  2. Pingback: Open Mobile Map » Weekly OSM Summary #5

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