MapQuest goes OpenStreetMap – At Least in UK

July 9, 2010 5 Comments

MapQuest, in that ever battle to stay relevant, has chosen to move toward OpenStreetMap.  Says the Wall Street Journal:

The company [MapQuest], a subsidiary of AOL, plans to announce Friday morning that it is launching a site in the U.K. based on a project called OpenStreetMap, which is dedicated to user-created mapping. The OpenStreetMap project has caught on most quickly in Europe, which is why MapQuest is starting there, but AOL also will devote $1 million to support the growth of open-source mapping in the U.S. The site has a U.K. address — http://open.mapquest.co.uk — but users can navigate to user-created maps from any country.

While we’ve all worked really hard here in the good old USA to improve the maps, clearly there is still a ton of work to get done (especially with building the networks), but $1,000,000 (doesn’t it look bigger when you use those zeros?) should help get this moving.  CloudMade tried to fund this through their Ambassador program, but pulled the plug when progress was slow in coming.  AOL is clearly committed to the program and probably happy to spend their dollars on funding OSM than shipping them off to Navteq (er Nokia) and their competition.  How long before Microsoft decides that they are done funding Nokia’s Ovi Maps effort through licensing and joins OSM or moves to Tele Atlas?

Now if AOL gave me that million dollars and asked me to figure out how to build out the USA, I’d go ahead and hire the top 10 German OSM contributes and set them loose on America.  It would be done in two weeks.  Seriously though, the USA map needs a ton of work and the quality of the map compared to Europe is probably the only thing holding back OSM.

MapQuest has more details on their blog.

Here comes AOL!

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Google Maps Now Uses Their Own Map Data

October 7, 2009 186 Comments

It looks like the new update to Google Maps gives us more than we thought.  Sure the parks looks nice in a blog post, but if I’m reading the tea leaves right, Google is now using their own data in at least parts of the world.

Some open data is being claimed copyright Google

Some open data is being claimed copyright Google

So I think this means that what we all expected to happen, did.  Tele Atlas is gone from the maps as far as I can tell and we now report our errors right back to Google.

Questions arise though…  Where did Google get this info from?   I’m guessing that it is USGS, MapMaker and probably some TIGER data.  Plus they’ve also cut deals with local organizations to get vectors.  The parcels, who knows… But if counties are giving it to Google and charging the public, we’ve got problems.  Also do they have rights to republish the data in the first place (due diligence)?  If I make corrections to their data, will they push those back to the organizations that donated the data or keep it themselves (and in turn own the data outright)?

Right now most of this looks visual as I can’t seem to access the parcels via their API.  Only a matter of time I suppose.

Looks like Google is going to walk on over all data providers, open or not.

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