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Steve Coast - OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap: The First Year

Geodata such as street maps or postcode databases are generally held in state-controlled monopolies, restricting the ability of ordinary hackers to make things and tell stories with maps. OpenStreetMap.org is developing the software and community needed to create open maps collaboratively in a wiki-like way.

Maps are made using freely-available Landsat satellite photography and user-submitted GPS traces with an open RESTful API and four community-written editors. Maps have been bootstrapped from other sources including a delivery company that has GPS units attached to its couriers and public domain maps. Eyeballs and footsteps are used to refine this data into a usable map.

The first year of OpenStreetMap has seen over fifteen hundred registered users contribute, a quarter of a million street segments added and 14 million GPS points uploaded from a wide variety of international contributors. The political and technical stresses and lessons learnt from the first year are discussed with an eye to a future where open geodata is the norm.