What is special about Geospatial?

The OpenStreetMap project is growing. The project can be compared with wikipadia. OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you. OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth.

“OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.“

Contributors to OpenStreetMap take handheld GPS devices with them on journeys, or go out specially to record GPS tracks. They record street names, village names and other features using notebooks, digital cameras, and voice-recorders.

Back at the computer, contributors upload those GPS logs showing where they travelled, and trace-out the roads on OpenStreetMap’s collaborative database. Using their notes, contributors add the street names, information such as the type of road or path, and the connections between roads.

That data is then processed to produce detailed street-level maps, which can be published freely on sites such as Wikipedia, used to create handheld or in-car navigation devices, or printed and copied without restriction.

This Animation showing the development of OSM in the area Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Germany. Time shown: August 2006 until September 2007. This animation is also shown at the German page on Munich.

Some issues or Problems are discussed here:

How can a project like this create accurate maps?

By the very nature of the wiki-style process there is no guarantee of accuracy of any kind. Then again, few proprietary maps carry a guarantee of accuracy, either. In fact, some have artificially-introduced errors.

The essence of a wiki-style process is that all users have a stake in having accurate data. If one person puts in inaccurate data, maliciously or accidentally, the other 99.9% of people can check it, fix it, or get rid of it. The vast majority of good-intentioned participants can automatically correct for the few bad apples.

And as they say, your mileage may vary. The Wikipedia project has shown that a large amount of good quality data can be collected but it can be difficult to weed out the inevitable errors.

Currently there are no processes or mechanisms, such as recent change lists and watchlists, that can be used to easily monitor edits within OpenStreetMap. We do however store a full editing history, and so these mediating processes will be developed as soon as they become necessary.

At the moment the best way to answer this question is to judge for yourself. One way is to pick an area that you know well and use the OpenStreetMap viewer to see how well the map data corresponds to your own knowledge. Maybe you will see something wrong or inaccurate. More likely you will find there’s nothing there yet. At this stage, our main challenge is to extend our coverage, without copying from existing maps. As on Wikipedia, it’s easy to edit, so you can help!

Why is the data sometimes inconsistent?

“OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.” Which means the database will always be subject to the whims, experimentation, and mistakes of the community; this is precisely OSM’s strength since, among other things, it allows our data to quickly accommodate changes in the physical world.

[openstreetmap.org]

Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.