Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
1–10 of 77 posts
Re: Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
#2How long, one wonders, until Open Street Map becomes the ubiquitous standard? Could Google switch to using it, and feed into it themselves to improve its results further?
Re: Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
#3How long, one wonders, until Open Street Map becomes the ubiquitous standard? Could Google switch to using it, and feed into it themselves to improve its results further?
Why would Google do that?
Re: Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
#4How long, one wonders, until Open Street Map becomes the ubiquitous standard? Could Google switch to using it, and feed into it themselves to improve its results further?
Why would Google do that?
I assume they're currently paying license fees, and spending lots of money on keeping their systems up to date.
Switching to open data would hopefully reduce both factors.
Re: Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
#5How long, one wonders, until Open Street Map becomes the ubiquitous standard? Could Google switch to using it, and feed into it themselves to improve its results further?
OpenStreetMap just underwent a rather tortuous conversion from using Creative Commons to the ODBL (http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/)
I don't fully understand the ramifications, but it's possible that this was done so that companies like Google could build products on top of OSM data rather than re-invent the wheel, possibly in a parallel to GPL and LGPL or the split between Linux and thing like Tivo or Android built on top.
From their relicencing FAQ:
" If you distribute OSM data with other map data, you have to make the other data available; But if you create an "integrated experience" (e.g. mashup or cartography), the share-alike licence only applies to the map data. "
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License_Rel...
Re: Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
#6[deleted]
Re: Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
#7How long, one wonders, until Open Street Map becomes the ubiquitous standard? Could Google switch to using it, and feed into it themselves to improve its results further?
The way Google is building out its maps data is way more sophisticated. Good look inside here: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...
Re: Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
#8How long, one wonders, until Open Street Map becomes the ubiquitous standard? Could Google switch to using it, and feed into it themselves to improve its results further?
Why would Google do that?
http://investor.google.com/corporate/faq.html#toc-mission
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Re: Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
#9How long, one wonders, until Open Street Map becomes the ubiquitous standard? Could Google switch to using it, and feed into it themselves to improve its results further?
Google won't dump their own maps for anyone else as long as they remain a competitive advantage. They're (thanks to recent events) clearly perceived as having some of the best maps in the business, as long as that remains so it's in their best interest to keep doing them in-house.
Re: Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
#10How long, one wonders, until Open Street Map becomes the ubiquitous standard? Could Google switch to using it, and feed into it themselves to improve its results further?
The way Google is building out its maps data is way more sophisticated. Good look inside here: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...
That's a strange article, almost certainly commissioned by Google as a PR opportunity to coincide with iOS6 maps, which I think misses most of the actual interesting stuff that Google brings to mapping (for example he talks about drawing a perfect circle for roundabouts as if this was some amazing feat on a computer? Compared with actually driving the whole world with a bunch of data capture devices strapped to the roof?) But most of the tools they talk about are available to OSM contributers and it's very odd for them to be highlighting Google's data-behind-the-map when that's exactly what you don't get from them, but do get from OSM:
http://oegeo.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/google-maps-and-openst...