In 2004, Steve Coast, a 33-year-old computer scientist from South East England, had an insanely ambitious idea – to create a free map of the world from scratch. Coast was annoyed by the way government-run mapping schemes – such as the Ordnance Survey in the UK – had created huge data sets, but failed to share them with the public. In response, he founded a non-profit organisation called the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Foundation. Similar to Wikipedia, the OSM world map is generated via crowdsourcing using GPS technology, aerial photography and other free sources. Mappers travel around on foot, by bike, car, and boat, mapping GPS points and uploading them into the online database.
Today OSM has over a million users and contributors. The data generated is used by a number of firms and organisations, from Flickr to Craigslist to Oxford University. When Google introduced a charging system for heavy users of its maps in 2012, there was a considerable shift towards OSM by firms like Foursquare, Apple (for iPhoto) and Geocaching.com.
The OSM Foundation may be crowdsourced and not-for-profit, but it doesn’t shy away from commercial collaborations. After a stint with Microsoft, Coast moved to partnering with the personalised navigation firm Telenav in September 2013: “Telenav and open street map are a sort of yin-yang partnership”, he says. “OSM has this great rich map data set; what it doesn’t have is huge amounts of GPS data to improve the map.” Corporations still own most of the world’s data – what OSM provides is access.
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