geo

The OpenStreetMap, what's possible when geographic information is shared?

Nate Olson interviews Steve Coast via email May 12-21, 2007

Steve Coast is a London-based programmer at the helm of OpenStreetMap (OSM), one of the Web's premier collaborative mapping projects. OpenStreetMap is billed as "a free editable map of the whole world... made by people like you." Anyone can use a GPS device to map his or her home neighborhood, upload it to OSM, and see the data included in the main user interface. The results are available for re-use under a Creative Commons license--a key selling point of OSM, which Steve created largely as an alternative to the kind of restriction-laden geodata used by Google Maps and similar applications.

Nate Olson: Do you consider "crowdsourcing" to be a distinct phenomenon? If so, how do you see it evolving over the next 1-2 years?

Steve Coast: Most definitely, and hopefully it's going to turn some business models upside down. I think of it more broadly than just building commons a la OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia. If you consider zopa.com (the peer money-lending site) as crowdsourcing, then you can start to see some really powerful things happening. They give savers with little capital access to high interest rates, and [also give] borrowers access to better-than-average [repayment] rates while doing interesting social stuff on the side. All while removing this big "bank" concept. You could think of Skype and Joost similarly--no need for expensive cable distribution networks when you force your users to do the bandwidth for you (they're both p2p apps).

Two of the most impressive projects in the mapping space are OpenStreetMap and Geonames. They approach the world's geography from opposite directions--from the street-level, upward, on the one hand, and from the country-level, downward, on the other--which makes them nice complements to one another in my mind.

1) OpenStreetMap (often referred to as just OSM) is led by Steve Coast, who's based in the UK. It's described as "a free editable map of the whole world... made by people like you." Progress in its early phases unsurprisingly has been concentrated in the UK and parts of continental Europe, but it seems to be gaining mindshare and momentum in lots of other places. This is a true example of crowdsourcing, as anyone can use a GPS device to map his or her home neighborhood, upload it to OSM, and see it included in the main OSM interface. The results are available for re-use under a share-alike Creative Commons license.

2) Geonames is led by Marc Wick, who's based in Switzerland. At its heart it's actually not a set of maps, but a database of place names--or, more precisely, a combination of databases. In other words, a gigantic gazetteer that catalogues both absolute position (longitude/latitutde) and relative position (political/administrative). Data is gathered mainly from third-party sources (typically government agencies at one level or another) with licenses that allow such re-use. (Marc posts here about one cool example in which data for Gipuzkoa, part of the Basque region in Spain, was donated to Geonames.) From this core of place names, Geonames can display several kinds of related information like demographics, nearby places, relevant Wikipedia entries, and actual maps via Google Maps.

While Geonames is not as thoroughgoing an example of crowdsourcing as OSM--Marc handles most responsibilities in collating the data--there are a variety of ways anyone can get involved. On the input side, people can submit whole datasets, add information for places already in the database (like alternate-language names), or correct errors. Recent changes are shown here. On the output side, the database is made available under an "attribution" Creative Commons license, and Marc has developed a variety of Web services with the help of others. This makes it, like OSM, a platform for many possible applications.