OpenStreetMap: the Open Source of the Mobile Age

One of the themes of this blog has been the wider influence of open source. Everyone knows about open content projects like Wikipedia, but one open endeavour that still hasn't made the big breakthrough into the public's consciousness is OpenStreetMap. Here's how it describes itself:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Has Ordnance Survey Managed to Find a Clue?

This is better than I was expecting:

Speaking at a seminar on Smarter Government in Downing Street later today, attended by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, the Prime Minister will set out how the Government and Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, will open up its data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information.

The Government will consult on proposals to make data from Ordnance Survey freely available so it can be used for digital innovation and to support democratic accountability.

Specifically:

Data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries as well as postcode areas would be released for free re-use, including commercially. Mid-scale digital mapping information would also be released in the same way.

...

The highest-specification Ordnance Survey products and services – such as those used by property developers or the utility companies – would be charged for on a cost-reflective basis.

This suggests that people in government are gradually beginning to understand that they can give away much of their data - well, actually, *our* data - and still generate revenue by targetting particular remunerative sectors.

I was also interested to read this:

Freely available facts and figures are essential for driving improvements in public services. It puts information, and therefore power, in the hands of the public and the service providers to challenge or demand innovation in public services.

The Prime Minister has set out the importance of an open data policy as part of broader efforts to strengthen democracy – creating a culture in which Government information is accessible and useful to as many people as possible in order to increase transparency and accountability, improve public services and create new economic and social value.

Now, I'm not so naïve as to believe this signals a massive sea-change in the present UK government's attitude to open data, openness and transparency. But what's significant is that it clearly feels the need at least to mouth the words: that is, it's aware that it is not in Kansas any more, and that the Ordnance Survey in its current form won't be providing any maps for them....

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Lack of Open Access to Geodata Costing Lives?

Here's another great example of why we need open access to public data:

The refusal of the government in Victoria, Australia, to provide data for Google's bushfire map mashup limited its scope and highlighted glaring problems with Crown copyright provisions, the search giant's top Australian engineer said yesterday.

...

The search giant's search for data to plot fires on public lands--which are managed by the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment--produced an entirely different result. With no public feed of the fires' location and an explicit denial of permission to access its own internal data, the engineers were ultimately unable to plot that data on the map as well.

It's not hard to imagine that such mashups, provided in a timely fashion, could have saved lives, either directly or indirectly. It's a perfect examaple of why governments have a duty to share such basic data as widely as possible.

Of the People, By the People, For the People

I'm rather slow in this one, but it's such a good example of how everyone gains from public collaboration - including Google, whose CTO of Google Earth, Michael Jones, is speaking here:

This is Hyderabad, and if you see the dark areas, those correspond to roads in low detail. If you zoom in, you'll see the roads, and if you expand a little bit, you'll see both roads and labelled places... there's graveyards, and some roads and so forth.

Now, everything you see here was created by people in Hyderabad. We have a pilot program running in India. We've done about 50 cities now, in their completeness, with driving directions and everything - completely done by having locals use some software we haven't released publicly to draw their city on top of our photo imagery.

This is the future, people - your future (though I do wonder about the map data copyright in these situations).

Up and At 'Em, Mappam

OpenStreetMap has always been one of my favourite open endeavours. It's a fine example of people getting fed up with official intransigence - in this case of the UK Government refusing to release public geodata - and getting off their bums to do something, rather than just whinge about it as others (like me) do.

So it's particularly gratifying to see that the chaps behind it are launching a geodata-related business, called Mappam:

Mappam helps you make money by adding relevant ads targeted to the exact place your visitors are browsing.

It's easy to set up and works with all the big web map services - Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, MultiMap and OpenStreetMap/OpenLayers.

Let's hope they've, er, found a way to make lots of dosh. (Via OpenBusiness.)

What is Open Knowledge?

If you were wondering, then perhaps the Open Knowledge Foundation might be able to help. They have come up with an Open Knowledge Definition (they actually call it The Open Knowledge Defiition, but that seems a tad ambitious). The full half-hour argument is here.

Some wise words from the introduction:

The concept of openness has already started to spread rapidly beyond its original roots in academia and software. We already have 'open access' journals, open genetics, open geodata, open content etc. As the concept spreads so we are seeing a proliferation of licenses and a potential blurring of what is open and what is not.

Well, that sounds familiar.