Contrary to popular belief, most mapping data is not free. At least one open source project aims to make it so.
For the past two years, Nic Roets, a local investor and programmer, has ridden his bicycle from Pretoria to his sister’s home in Johannesburg. With him, he takes a handheld GPS device that records his routes on different back roads to which he adds road names, security road closures and other data.
Back home, he uploads the data to OpenStreetMap.org, an open source project to produce detailed streetlevel maps that can be published freely on sites such as Wikipedia, used to create handheld or in-car navigation devices, or printed and copied without restriction. Why has Roets ridden about 100km a week for more than two years for a project that gives away this data for free? And why is this softly spoken programmer from Pretoria (and his 130 000 collaborators around the world) causing so many mapping companies to feel threatened as location based data goes open?
OpenStreetMap is an international, volunteer-driven, Open Source GIS data project that is “creating free geographic data such as street maps for anyone who wants them”.
According to the founders, the project was started because “most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding people back from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways”.
The data in the project is freely available to all under the Creative Commons Share Alike licence. Unlike most of its commercial competitors, the data in OpenStreetMap is not just free as in ‘no cost’, it is also available for others (even commercial users) to use to build their own commercial services. The licence conditions only require that you share your improvements with the community.
In countries like the UK and Germany, mapping data on OpenStreet- Map is already complete to the level that contributors are now surveying and mapping individual buildings and post boxes.
According to Roets, it has only just started to look promising in South Africa, mostly because of the small community of contributors and slow pace of getting base data from municipalities. Working with municipalities OpenStreetMap usually starts out the mapping project in a particular region by obtaining base data from municipalities and government GIS units. Paid for by taxpayers, one would expect that this data would be free from copyright restrictions. Not always, says OpenStreetMap contributor Grant Slater.
“In South Africa, eThekwini (Durban) municipality and Cape Town have been helpful in sharing base data with the OpenStreetMap project but municipalities like Johannesburg seem to have data that is polluted with restrictive licensing and ownership ambiguity.”
Government spends millions getting GIS companies to develop mapping data and yet OpenStreetMap volunteers are discovering that the ownership of such data is often ambiguous. “It is my view that South African growth and innovation in the GIS, internet and location-based services space is being held back by a few companies, along with the state being overly restrictive with their own datasets,” says Slater.
Beyond SA
South Africa is not the only country dealing with such debates. In the UK, the call for ‘open data’ that isn’t tied up with restrictive licensing arrangements is gaining ground – with the Guardian newspaper heading up a campaign called ‘Free our data’, lobbying for free public access to data about the UK and its citizens. The ‘Free our data’ campaign declares that anyone who wants to create a site or service that uses government data would benefit. States the Guardian: “Potentially, that means all of us, since government data is about us.”
The campaign is focussing on lobbying entities such as Ordnance Survey, which derives roughly half its income from licences by taxpayer-funded organisations, to free its data, rather than creating open source GIS data from scratch.
“As much as we admire the stoicism of the people at OpenStreetMap, when you compare it to the Post Offi ce’s thousands of postcodes – which it has to verify – and the Ordnance Survey’s billion-odd bits of data, which would cost perhaps £200m in taxes to keep updated to their present quality – that is, about £4 per taxpayer per year – you have to say that it makes more sense to free the existing data than to reinvent the wheel. It’s a very large wheel.”
Founder of OpenStreetMap, Steve Coast, responds to the Guardian by saying: “This misses the point of what’s useful. We don’t have to have millions of postcodes to be useful. We don’t need to know where trees are to the millimetre to create a map that’s 99 percent useful.”
New ecosystems
Coast is adamant that companies that hold onto data with restrictive licence agreements and ‘behave like Encyclopaedia Britannica did with Wikipedia, are going to die”.
He believes that the ecosystem of the future will be found in “removing the value from the data itself and pushing that value further up the stack”. Coast has recently cofounded a company called Cloud Made, with €2.4m in venture capital funding to ramp up development software and services that work with Open- StreetMap data. Developing such niche-market services, he believes, is creating a similar ecosystem to the Linux community that has spawned a host of commercial services to support use of the application in specifi c commercial settings.
Also emerging from the OpenStreetMap community is a German company called Geofabrik, which was started by active OSM contributor Frederik Ramm, in 2007. Geofabrik’s services include consulting, training and software development using the free geodata from OpenStreetMap.
According to the Geofabrik site: “Free, community-maintained data like that produced by the OpenStreetMap project is a real alternative to the offerings of the trade’s top players. Such data is not only free of charge, but also comes with fewer licence restrictions than other offers.”
In 2007, Yahoo.com offerered OpenStreetMap its aerial photography for tracing. In turn, Yahoo! has started using OpenStreetMap data within its Flickr service for various cities around the world, including Baghdad, Beijing, Kabul, Sydney and Tokyo, thus building a mutually beneficial relationship for both the OpenStreetMap community and Yahoo!.
The Yahoo! relationship becomes clearer when you consider how valuable crowdsourcing can be in places that commercial mapping companies generally ignore. By enabling people to directly edit maps of their own surroundings, OpenStreetMap has become a sustainable way for companies to derive comprehensive, detailed and up-to-date data that includes new landmarks, narrow alleys and small roads.
The long tail of mapping
Apart from the public and humanitarian function of the project (the OpenStreet- Map community is working to map the Gaza Strip “for humanitarian relief efforts and other purposes”), it can also develop niche-market services for communities ignored by bigger mapping companies. Roets says that there is an opportunity to provide more niched services in South Africa – for example, by providing mountain biking routes that are not currently being mapped by commercial vendors.
Community creation
OpenStreetMap volunteers in South Africa have faced a number of challenges from companies that feel their business models are under threat as street maps go open. In other countries where open geodata is more advanced, entrants to the GIS field are recognising that the openness of their data is a clear competitive advantage over legacy business models as the public demands greater access to their data. And when OpenStreetMap volunteers find out that the data that government paid for is not, in fact, owned by government, they merely route around the problem and create the data from scratch.
Clearly, the OpenStreetMap community is a problem for businesses that rely on licensing geodata that is not going to go away.
The exponential growth of OpenStreetMap
2004: OpenStreetMap (OSM) is founded by Brit Steve Coast.
2006: The OpenStreetMap Foundation is established to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data. Later that year, Yahoo! confi rms that OpenStreetMap can use its aerial photography as a backdrop for map production.
2007: Automotive Navigation Data donates a complete road dataset for the Netherlands and trunk road data for India and China to the project. In December, Oxford University becomes the fi rst major organisation to use OpenStreetMap data on its main website. There are 9 000 registered users.
2008: Two founders announce venture capital funding of €2.4m for Cloud Made, a commercial company that will use OpenStreet- Map data. There are now 50 000 registered users, with over 5 000 active contributors.
2009: In March, the 100 000 user mark is surpassed. Today, there are over 130 000 users of OpenStreetMap.
PICTURE
TEAM EFFORT
Nic Roets is one of 130 000 people around the world who collaborate to create free maps that are not owned by governments or companies.
