Suitcase-Sized Drones Extend And Deepen OpenStreetMap's Coverage

An increasing number of online services use location information. This places suppliers like Google, with its Google Maps, in a strong position, since creating such geodata for entire countries -- or the world -- is something that can only be undertaken by large, well-funded companies. At least, that was true in the past, but increasingly the free, crowd-sourced alternative, OpenStreetMap, is gaining both contributors and commercial users: 

On Techdirt.

TomTom Kicks Off FUD Campaign Against 'Dangerous' Open Source Mapping

Recently, Techdirt wrote about the increasing number of Web sites that were dumping Google Maps and turning to OpenStreetMap (OSM) instead. But that's only one aspect of the increasingly important digital mapping sector: another is for use with in-car satnav systems. So an obvious question is: how is OpenStreetMap doing here? 

On Techdirt.

Why Microsoft Loves The Rise of (Some) Openness

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how businesses based around giving stuff away were able to make money by replacing far more expensive options. One aspect of that is that open source leaves money in people's wallets. The other side, of course, is that purveyors of more expensive options tend to lose out. That's a pattern that is being repeated across different industries - not just in the software world.

On Open Enterprise blog.

OpenStreetMap: The Next Wave Of Commoditization For Startups?

One of the striking features of some of the most successful startups over the last ten years – companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter – is that their infrastructure is based almost entirely around open source. Of course, that shouldn't really be surprising: open source allows people to get prototypes up and running for the price of a PC, which is great for trying out ideas with live code. And yet despite these zero-cost origins, open source software scales up to supercomputing levels - the perfect solution for startups that hope to grow. 

On Techdirt.

Open Mapping Considered Harmful

If you want further proof that openness is inherently subversive, try this:

China's Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (BSM) has warned foreigners to turn off the GPS functions on their mobile phones, or risk arrest.

The bureau warned foreigners using GPS devices on mainland China that they could be detained if suspected of conducting illegal mapping.

The bureau has launched a crackdown on “illegal surveying”, the South China Morning Post reported, with foreigners the main targets.

Hmm, nobody seems to have told the OpenStreetMap people, who are merrily mapping China.... (Via James Fallows.)

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OpenStreetMap Navigates to Wikipedia

One of the powerful features of open source is re-use: you don't have to re-invent the wheel, but can build on the work of others. That's straightforward enough for software, but it can also be applied to other fields of openness. Here's a fantastic example: embedding OpenStreetMap in Wikipedia entries:

For some time, there have been efforts to bring OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Wikipedia closer together. Both projects have the mission to produce free knowledge and information through a collaborative community process. Because of the similarities, there are many users active in both projects – however mutual integration is still lacking.

For this reason, Wikimedia Deutschland (WM-DE, the German Chapter of Wikimedia) are providing funds of 15.000 Euro (almost $20k) and starting a corresponding pilot project. A group of interested Wikipedians and OSM users have partnered up to reach two goals: The integration of OSM-maps in Wikipedia and the installation of a map toolserver. The map toolserver will serve to prototype new mapping-related projects and preparing them for deployment on the main Wikimedia cluster.

Here's how it will work:

Maps are an important part of the information in encyclopaedic articles - however currently mostly static maps are used. With interactive free maps and a marking system a way of presenting information can be created.

For some time there have been MediaWiki Extensions available for embedding OpenStreetMap maps into MediaWiki. That's a great start, but it isn't enough. If these extensions were deployed on Wikipedia without any kind of proxy set-up, the OpenStreetMap tile servers would struggle to handle the traffic.

One of our aims is to build an infrastructure in the Wikimedia projects that allows us to keep the OSM data, or at least the tile images, ready locally in the Wikimedia network. We still have to gain a some experience about this, but we are optimistic about that. On one side, we have a number of Wikipedians in the team, who are versed in MediaWiki and scaling software systems, and on the other side we have OSM users who can set up the necessary geo database.

We learned much from the use of the Wikimedia-Toolservers – for example that on a platform for experimenting much more useful tools were developed than it was predicted. Interested developers have a good starting position to develop new tools with new possibilities.

We expect similar results from the map toolserver. As soon as it is online, everyone who is interested and presents his ideas of development projects and his state of knowledge can apply for an account. We want to allow as many users as possible to implement their ideas without having to care about the basic setup. We hope that in the spirit of the creation and distribution of free content many new maps and visualisations emerge.

Now, it's happening:

There has been rapid progress on the subject of adding OpenStreetMap maps to Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikipedia) during the MediaWiki Developer Meet-Up taking place right now in Berlin.

Maps linked to Wikipedia content *within* Wikipedia: I can't wait.

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OpenStreetMap Passes 100,000 Users

Although many people have heard of OpenStreetMap, not everyone realises just how damn successful and important it is becoming. Here's one indication:

Sometime during Monday 16th March 2009 OpenStreetMap gained it’s 100,000′th registered user account!

Moreover, the graph on the page linked to above also shows that there are now over one billion track points on its maps.

I predict that soon people will be talking about OpenStreetMap as a demonstration of how openness works in the same awed tones as they do now about GNU/Linux.

Free The Postcode - Yes, *You* There

One of the most successful open projects is OpenStreetMap, which seeks to bypass the Ordnance Survey's stranglehold on geodata in the UK. It does this by enlisting the people - you and me - to recreate the maps that the OS guards, Fafnir-like, in its lair.

The success and simplicity of that approach suggests that it could be usefully applied in other circumstances where valuable public data is being kept proprietary by those hypnotised by the glint of gold. So I was delighted to learn about Free the Postcode:

The postcode database - which turns a postcode to a latitude/longitude and back - is not free in the UK. In fact, it's very expensive. The Post Office owns it and sells it to various companies that make use of it for things like insurance or parcel tracking. There are however many people who'd like to use it for non-profit purposes. Say you want to lay out events like free concerts / gigs on a map and you only have the postcode... you have to buy the database.

Instead, wouldn't it be nice if it was free like zipcodes are in the US? To do this, you have to have a number of people collaborating with GPS units who note positions and postcodes. Hence this site to collect that data.

The great thing about this project is that it is unstoppable: even if you wanted to, you couldn't prevent the majority of people from entering their drip of information, which means that the steady swelling of the cumulative ocean of data is equally ineluctable. This is what makes collaborative open projects so resilient: there is no one choke point that those who might object to its activites can attack.

So, basically, Mr Post Office, you're stuffed. (Via TechCrunch UK.)

Seven things people didn't know about me...

...And probably didn't want to. Thanks to that nice Mr Mark Surman, I have been not only tagged but also subjected to fiendishly-clever emotional blackmail in the accompanying email:

I realize this is corny. But corny can be fun. This kind of fun is something I dare you to have.

The rules are:

Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.


Share seven facts about yourself in the post.


Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.


Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Sigh. So, here goes:

1. As I child, I kept frog spawn (still abundant in those far-off days), fascinated by the extraordinary metamorphosis it underwent. Once, among the many froglets that emerged, one had six legs, and two had five (all extra forelimbs.)

2. At primary school, I was one of the ugly sisters in “Cinderella”. I still remember the rather fetching pink and lime-green dress that I wore.

3. I spent most of my free time at secondary school playing bridge. Unfortunately, I used the Blue Club system, which, according to Wikipedia, is no longer popular, making it even more of an utter waste of time.

4. I was Senior Wrangler in the 1977 Tripos. Barely anyone knows what that means; even fewer care. 100 years ago, it would have guaranteed me a pampered college fellowship for life. I regard it as lucky escape.

5. My first post-university job was as a maths supply teacher for 30+ 15-year-olds in Catford, South London, most of whom were larger than me, but rather less interested in mathematics than I was. I lasted two months before being escaping to publishing.

6. I was taken off a train at near-gunpoint in Belarus for travelling without a transit visa. At 5 o'clock in the morning. I then had to rush to the immigration office attached to the Grodno border station and get a visa before the waiting train left for Vilnius with all my luggage on board.

7. I am powerless in the presence of honey-roasted cashews. An interesting case of where traditional mathematics breaks down, and 1+1=3.

The rules say I must now pass on this poisoned chalice to others, but unlike Mark I won't add any pressure: please feel free to ignore if you wish, or have already been tagged – I did search, but happily Google is not yet omniscient.

The names below are all key people in the UK world of openness in various ways, and I think it would be interesting to find out more about them. They are (in alphabetical order):

OpenStreetMap's Steve Coast

Open data defender Peter Murray-Rust

Alfresco's John Newton

Sun's Simon Phipps

BT's JP Rangaswami

Boycott Novell's Roy Schestowitz

Open government enthusiast Tom Steinberg

Mapping the OpenStreetMap Ecosystem

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is not only a great example of the open source methodology being applied outside software, it also started in the UK, which is something to celebrate. Not that's its stayed there of course, as this crowd-sourced mapping system spreads around the world.

One measure of its success and maturity is the fact that a commercial ecosystem is beginning to form around it, just as happened with GNU/Linux in the mid 1990s. Here's an interesting hint of what's to come in this area....

On Open Enterprise blog.

OpenStreetMap's Lead Out in the Open

I've written many times about OpenStreetMap, but rarely in the context of the proprietary online mapping services. Here's a post that shows why open is better: in several important locations - such as Baghdad, apparently - it's the *only* option:

And when you're done with Baghdad, check out Kabul, yet another place where Google Mapmaker isn't enabled: Yahoo Maps, Virtual Earth, Google Maps vs. OpenStreetMap. It isn't even close.

Mapping the (Open) Future

OpenStreetMap goes from strength to strength:

Earlier this week the project surpassed 50,000 registered users with over 5,000 actively contributing data each month. Historically the contributor base has doubled every 5 months. That means there will be around 50,000 adding data monthly by the end of 2009. That’s a ten fold increase from today.

Right now on each and every day, 25,000km of roads gets added to the OpenStreetMap database, on the historical trend that will be over 200,000km per day by the end of 2009. And that doesn’t include all the other data that makes OpenStreetMap the richest dataset available online.

It's also growing in other ways:

Until very recently we talked about OpenStreetMap being a global project but the reality was that outside of Europe and the TIGER-Line fed USA the pockets of OpenStreetMap activity were sporadic, often just one contributor in each place, or the devoted work of one or two burning the midnight oil tracing over the Yahoo! imagery layer in far flung places. Even that’s changing though. The OpenStreetMap community itself is growing and one of the best examples of that is the proliferation of national websites acting as local language portals for the project. Already there is openstreetmap.ca, .ch, .cl, .de, .fr, .it, .jp, .nl, .se, .org.za and that’s probably missing a few that are on the way.

OpenStreetMap is clearly fast becoming one of the open world's signal achievements. (Via James Tyrrell.)

Mapping the Power of People

Leaving aside Terminal 5's little teething problems today, and independently of the fact that the only way they will get my fingerprints is if they cut my fingers off, here's a heart-warming tale of how the people beat The Man/Men when it comes to providing up-to-the-minute maps:

Heathrow’s terminal 5 is a major high profile new development. On it’s own it is bigger than any other airport in Europe except Frankfurt. It will generate, from today, more car journeys than a decent sized town. Yet most of the on-line mapping sites don’t seem to be capable of having a decent map ready on the day that it opens.

It’s examples like this that demonstrate how well OpenStreetMap can produce accurate and timely maps. Further vindication of the effectiveness of the OpenStreetMap approach.

(Via James Tyrrell.)

Why Free Flies - and Galileo Doesn't

Nice little piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian today that pulls together a bunch of disparate stories (including my Alfresco profile from yesterday's edition of the same) to explain why giving stuff away makes economic sense. I particularly liked the following:

What I do find ironic though about the (very laudable) OpenStreetMap model is how it's acquired. The key element is Global Positioning Systems, aka GPS, aka sat-nav. GPS didn't just fall into the sky. It cost a lot of money to put it up there, and a fair bit to keep going - about $400m annually, including satellite updates.

But here's the thing about GPS: it's free to use, and in the short time that it's been available outside the military, its use has exploded. Figures for the value of the market are hard to come by, but EADS-Astrium estimates (in the graph at the end of the link) that this year it's worth about €40 billion. That's a hell of a multiplier on something that you give away for free, given a comparatively small investment.

CloudMade: Open Data on Cloud Nine

It's always good to see people who have given to the commons finding a way to make some dosh too. I've written before about the worthy OpenStreetMap, and now it seems that Steve Coast, the man behind it, has started a new outfit, Cloud Made, that aims to put it to commercial use. Alas, its Web site isn't very informative yet:

Building on our expertise in the fields of community mapping, open data and open systems we offer innovative solutions customised to your needs.

CloudMade approach problems differently.

Applying agile techniques to heavyweight problems, we can help you make the most of exciting new opportunities that commons based production methods offer.

Er, right.

Bit more info here, though:

ZXY, the company behind Cloudmade, is comprised of London-based entrepreneurs Nick Black and Steve Coast. They are two of the proprietors of Open Street Map (Steve launched the project and is on the board; Nick is a spokesperson; Both contribute to the map). ZXY is also behind geo-advertising company Mappam (Radar post). As two of the leaders of a large, open source project the pair will have to balance the needs of their business with the needs of the project -- luckily these will usually be in sync. OSM now gets over 1000 contributions a month (a huge milestone). I suspect that commercial deals will be viewed as validation by the community.

Indeed.

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.)

Mapping the Fourth Dimension

Good to see that Yahoo is letting OpenStreetMap use its aerial imagery to speed up the process of free map creation.

Of course, we still need to get all those street names and features. GPS traces are by no means dead - think of the new housing estates and areas without imagery. But instead of cycling down every road you should be able to just pass lots of them at either end to get the names. Or just from memory.

Where does this bring us to? Well the ‘big map companies’ use expensive cars and expensive aircraft with expensive cameras and expensive GPS units to create maps. Maybe our GPS units are cheaper and less accurate, but does it matter? I think not. We now have all the pieces of the puzzle and we’re putting out great maps for Free using Free tools.

But I was even more impressed to see that OpenStreetMap has already mapped some of the future too: take a look at the entries here for March 2007.

The Tragedy of the Enclosed Lands

How could I resist a blog entitled "From Sink Estates to SQL", with the subtitle "Thoughts on Housing, IT, FOSS and Politics" - to say nothing of posts called "The Tragedy of the Enclosed Lands" with long, sad tales like this:

Last year I attended a demonstration by some companies looking to supply us with a GIS solution. I did not get to hear any costs at this point, but what maddened me somewhat was the level of restrictions the data suppliers wanted to put on any information they gave us.

These included :

- Insisting that if we put map data on our intranet we'd have to buy a licence for every potential user, i.e. every person who has access to our intranet. Considering this is over a thousand people now (and growing) this is fairly ridiculous.

- Advising us that we would only be able to print out maps (to include in publications to customers) if we got additional licences for this.

- If we decided not to renew our licence for the data, we'd have to destroy all maps produced/printed as well as the more obvious step of deleting all data we'd produced and uninstalling the software.

Reasons why proprietary approaches are doomed, No. 4,597. But do read the rest of the post, it's very thoughtful, and concludes stirringly:

I actually believe that mapping data will be de-facto public domain within the next decade. Until then though, we have alternatives. Of the data we collect, I intend to submit it all to the Open Street Map project (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Main_Page) which is an excellent attempt to bypass some of the legal faggotry in the copyright datasets. Collectively, we can tear down the enclosures. We can rebuild a commons which can help organisations of all sizes innovate with GIS technologies (surely something which can only increase with better mobile devices?)

OpenStreetMap Takes the Path of Stallman

There's a piece in the Guardian about OpenStreetMap's Isle of Wight effort. I was struck by this wonderful quotation:

The weekend drew around 40 people. By Monday, OpenStreetMap's founder Steve Coast estimated that more than 90% of the island's roads had been recorded. When asked if volunteers used OS [Ordnance Survey] maps, Coast says: "No. It's a taboo." Someone who did pull out an OS map was told to put it away immediately.

Which is precisely analogous to Richard Stallman's attitude when he started GNU, his project to create a benevolent Doppelgänger of the Unix operating system. This is what he told me for Rebel Code:

"I certainly never looked at the source code of Unix. Never. I once accidentally saw a file, and when I realised it was part of Unix source code, I stopped looking at it." The reason was simple: The source code "was a trade secret, and I didn't want to be accused of stealing that trade secret," he says. "I condemn trade secrecy, I think it's an immoral practice, but for the project to succeed, I had to work within the immoral laws that existed."

OpenStreetMap - Finding Our Way

I wrote a little about the Guardian's campaign to obtain open access to Government-generated data (which we pay for), but here's an interesting alternative: generate it yourself.

This weekend, a bunch of intrepid GPS users aims to map the whole of the Isle of Wight, and then to use this information to generate their own detailed maps, which will be in released under a Creative Commons licence.

The overarching project is called OpenStreetMap, and it seems the perfect way to get public mapping data. Rather waiting for the Government graciously to give us our data back, let's take to the streets and do it ourselves: of the people, by the people, for the people.

Now, if only I had a GPS device....