I’d like to point the german-​speaking among you to the Chaos­Ra­dio Pod­cast Issue on Open Street Map. The Open Street Map (wikipedia entry) project is a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort to create maps with­out many of the licens­ing restric­tions of other, pro­pri­etary, sources (OSM uses the Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-​Share Alike 2.0 license). Even though the map is the most vis­i­ble fea­ture of the project, it is mainly a data-​collection effort. Addi­tional infor­ma­tion, as in the case of a road data like the amount of lanes, dri­ving direc­tion or speed limits can also be stored in the OSM data­base. This data can than be ren­dered in a mul­ti­tude of ways and styles, like in other GIS sys­tems. In con­trast to these sys­tems which cover the pro­fes­sional market, open street map has a more com­pre­hen­si­ble inter­face. At this time about 70.000 people have reg­is­tered at the project site.

The com­mu­nity is most active in cen­tral and north­ern Europe, and that is reflected in the amount of data and layers you have in the maps. Whereas in areas with an active com­mu­nity the data set is quite detailed, as for exam­ple in Berlin, other areas are blank – depend­ing where the focus of the par­tic­i­pat­ing com­mu­nity lies. So in some spots you have infor­ma­tion down to public phone booths, post boxes and bus stops, whereas in other regions even names of main streets are miss­ing. In that respect the project is com­pa­ra­ble to the early wikipedia, and might well grow to sim­i­lar impor­tance. Con­tinue read­ing ‘Open Street Map’