‘Community’ Mapping – so much choice
This is certainly the time for ‘community’ mapping, there are so many organisations to choose from! So if I want to contribute to a ‘community’ spatial data set I could choose from:
1. The original Open Street Map, with the famous parties…
2. MapMaker from Google, as endorsed by our Ed
4. TeleAtlas MapInsight
5. Navteq’s MapReporter
6. TomTom’s MapShare
7. Geonames – an open place name gazetteer
8. And more I am sure I have missed…
Hmmm, which one should I choose? Is there any relationship between any of these datasets? Do I need to update each one to make sure my updates have the maximum impact from my change? And most importantly WiiFM (what’s in it for me)?
Meanwhile there endless blog debate about who is better than who, see here, here and here.
Well I’m holding off for now…
Hmm… let me see:
1. OSM – Open and free, you put the data in, you can get it out again whenever you want, you can do almost anything with the data. Open source tools are provided to convert the data to many formats and to work with it in many different ways.
2. MapMaker – Closed, you put the data in, it might show up, it might not, you can only use the map tiles with google maps
3. AND’s map 2.0 – Closed, you put the data in, you can only get it back out by viewing their website, buying the dataset or using someone’s product that uses their dataset and who has updated to the latest version.
4. TeleAtlas MapInsight – Closed, you put the data in, you can only get it back out by viewing their website, buying the dataset or using someone’s product that uses their dataset and who has updated to the latest version.
5. Navteq’s MapReporter – Closed, you put the data in, you can only get it back out by viewing their website, buying the dataset or using someone’s product that uses their dataset and who has updated to the latest version.
6. TomTom’s MapShare – Closed, you put the data in, you can only get it back out by updating your TomTom, but you can’t get it back out to use elsewhere.
7. Geonames – Tainted, oh so tainted data. It may consider itself an open dataset but it’s all based on teleatlas and navteq data (and possibly google’s data now) so those companies can claim ownership of it whenever they want.
That said, I’m a pragmatic person so I’d say that if you’re driving along with your TomTom and come to a road that’s blocked, clearly you should add that into your TomTom, it benefits you directly. What you should also do when you get home though is fire up a web browser, head over to openstreetmap.org and enter the data there too!
Also if you need a quick source of named POIs, go ahead and use Geonames, and update it when you find missing entries, but don’t rely on it and be wary of the licensing problems.
If you’re intending to spend a large quantity of time entering data into one of these projects it clearly has to be Open Street Map, only thing is, I have a feeling the places you go already have pretty good coverage Tim!
Wow. I came to this site accidentally but johns response to your question was really helpful.
Thanks!