OpenStreetMap

Karel Janecka

Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Applied SciencesUniversity of West Bohemia

Pilsen, Czech Republic

kjanecka@kma.zcu.cz

OpenStreetMap

• OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world.

• The maps are created using the data from portable GPS devices, aerial photography, other free sources or simply from local knowledge.

• Both rendered images and the vector graphics are available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence.

OpenStreetMap

• OpenStreetMap was inspired by sites such as Wikipedia - a full revision history is maintained.

• Registered users can upload their GPS track logs and edit the vector data using the given editing tools.

History

• OpenStreetMap (OSM) was founded in July 2004 by Steve Coast.

• In April 2006, a foundation was established with the aim of encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share.

• In December 2006 Yahoo confirmed that OpenStreetMap could use their aerial photography as a backdrop for map production

History

• By August 2008, shortly after the second The State of the Map conference was held, there were over 50,000 registered contributors; by March 2009 there were 100,000 and by the end of 2009 there were nearly 200,000.

• Note that not all registered contributors actually contribute to the map - in March 2008 approximately 10% of the registered users were contributing to the map data each month

Technology

• The initial map data was all built from scratch – volunteers performed systematic ground surveys using a handheld

GPS units and a notebooks or a voice recorders

• Collected data were then entered into the OpenStreetMap database from a computer

• More recently the availability of aerial photography and other data sources from commercial and government sources has greatly increased the speed of this work and has allowed land-use data to be collected more accurately.

• When large datasets are available a technical team will manage the conversion and import of the data.

Licencing

• OpenStreetMap data is published under an open content licence, with the intention of promoting free use and re-distribution of the data (both commercial and non-commercial).

• The currently used licence is the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 licence– however legal investigation work and community consultation is

under-way to re-license the project under the Open Database Licence (ODbL) which is more suitable for a map dataset

OpenStreetMap

Integration of OSN into applications