Tag: mapping

OSM Army

I’m not convinced that the state of the art in GIS databases has appropriate answers. The OSM community, as ever, creates new cart-tracks across well-paved spaces. The debate is too heated for any but the really committed to follow, the tracks become effaced in debate, but perhaps they’re leading somewhere new. Or as the New Data Model paper puts it, Complexity does not mean that it has to be more complicated.

jo thinks the new OSM data model is more RDF-like, which of course she approves of

Collaborative Mapping business models

Let’s start by fast forwarding to a future where we have economically successful collaborative maps. Then from there we can look back and see how we might get there, what tipping points would be involved. it is possible to decouple the function of ‘ownership’ of a set of geospatial data from the functions that are needed for its upkeep. Indeed such a decoupling could easily lead to a more efficient market around the upkeep of the data. One thing we neglected to mention as well is that a collaborative map opens up the potential for non ‘expert’ contributors to do valuable work, as long as the structure is set up to minimize vandalism and the like.