I’ll be honest, I really don’t follow Esri as closely as I used to. Not so much in that I don’t care to learn about what they are working on, more just that they do so many more things these days. It’s honestly hard to follow along sometimes, but every once in a while I see something that catches my eye.

 Esri is now offering a new option in our Community Maps Program for contributors to have Esri share their data with selected Esri partners and other organizations (e.g. OpenStreetMap) that maintain popular mapping platforms for businesses and consumers. If contributors choose to share their data with others, Esri will aggregate the data and make it available to these organizations in a standardized way to make the data more easily consumable by them and accessible to others. It will be up to those organizations whether they choose to include the data in their mapping platforms.  Where the data is used, attribution will be provided back to Esri Community Maps Contributors and/or individual contributing organizations.

Community Maps Data Sharing

I have to admit this intrigues me. Not so much that Esri is trying to insert themselves into a process, but that it makes sharing data easier for users of Esri software. In the end that’s probably more important than philosophical differences of opinion about closed fists and the such. The data is shared via the CC by 4.0 license that Esri uses for the Community Maps AOIs. I really like this, anything that helps share data much easier is a good thing for everyone, including OpenStreetMap. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this during the Esri UC later this month but it’s still a great announcement. I’ve always been a big users of OSM and getting more organizations to update their data in OSM is a huge win in my book.