[Openstreetmap] The bigger picture

[Tom Carden]

On 2/14/06, David Groom <reviews at pacific-rim.net> wrote:
<snipped good points - well put>
> I work as a web designer, and it is surprising how many web sites either
> require, or could be improved by, a map.  At present in the UK we are
> limited to offerings from the Ordnance Survey, Multimap, or Streetmap, all
> of which either require you to link to a page full of extraneous data and
> links, or require a substantial fee. What would really be nice would be a
> simple image of the relevant area that could be downloaded, maybe with a
> choice of background colour, that I could then annotate as I required with
> no licensing restrictions. I'd willing pay at least £10 for that.  Multiply
> that £10 by the number of people in a similar position to me and you start
> to pay for your IT infrastructure.
>

You're absolutely on the button with this one.  It's fair to say that
a lot of the maps on UK websites are routinely stolen (sorry,
*infringed*) from the Ordnance Survey.  One thing I'd like to see OSM
become is a resource that designers could routinely use to source maps
(and contribute back where possible) without having to do that.

Your suggestion is a good one, and shouldn't be tough to implement. 
The question is - how reliable/complete does the data need to be
before it's worth enabling such a feature?  What metrics could we
provide (300 people edited this region in the last year, it has been
viewed 20 times today, etc. etc.) that would allow people to judge
whether the map was likely to be accurate or not?  Could the £10 you
suggest be split between OpenStreetMap and a commercial
satellite/aerial photography company perhaps, with the latter
providing pay-for access to imagery that would allow you to
sanity-check the OSM data?

> To sum up:
>
> give me something I can use;    and
> ask me to pay someting towards it.
>

Absolutely.  I'd also like to make it as easy as possible for your use
of OSM resources to feed back into the dataset and enrich it in some
way.  For example, you're putting on a music festival in your home
town and want a map with all the venues on.   It would be *fantastic*
if OSM could support the creation of the entire raw data set, leaving
only the look and feel for the event to the designer.  Some of us are
already looking into exporting to SVG or other formats which can be
manipulated by professional graphics packages.  One thing I suggested
a while back was to open up this facility to everyone, but limit it to
once a month (for example) and offer a reasonably priced 'commercial
support' package with unlimited export to vector formats.  Something
like that.

Note that I'm not talking about restricting access to the API,
although that again is something that could be a pay-for service for
commercial use.  Basically, so long as people are always entitled to
access OSM's raw data for their own personal use, I think there are a
bunch of ways that commercial/for-profit uses of OSM could be
supported/enabled *and* support the hosting costs or even employ a
couple of people to run OSM full time.

You've suggested one use-case for OSM maps (and we've already seen
flight-sims, and Lars would like to have OSM-pwoered satellite
navigation, etc.) - what other use cases are there, and how quickly
could they be supported, assuming the data was there?  I would *love*
to see a Google/Yahoo style Maps API for people to embed an
interactive OpenStreetMap on their website.  How about you?

Best,

Tom.