Woo! Check it out.
San Jose, California – September 16, 2009 – deCarta, the leading supplier of software and services for the Location-Based Services (LBS) industry, today announced the launch of its beta program supporting OpenStreetMap (OSM) data.
The beta program makes the OSM content available for selected cities around the world. A product release that will support the complete coverage of OSM is scheduled for October 2009.
Interesting article here:
The City of Johannesburg is closing off its GIS data in a ‘cost recovery’ move that other South African municipalities are set to follow. This, say some industry players, is not in keeping with Joburg’s plans to become ‘a world-class African city’.
Go to the City of Johannesburg’s ‘e-services’ online mapping site on a Mac or on a Firefox browser and you’ll be disappointed. In bold red letters, a notice reads: ‘PLEASE NOTE: The online map viewer is only compatible with Internet Explorer 6 or higher…’
The problems don’t end here. Further along in the process, you’ll see a ‘disclaimer’ that reads: ‘The contents may not be copied, reproduced, redistributed to third parties in any form for any purpose whatsoever, or applied to commercial use without the written consent of the Council.’
Over the next month or so I’m speaking at some cool conferences you might want to check out:
Check out this review at the unofficial apple weblog of Roadee, a iPhone nav app which uses OSM:
Yes, all true. I’m talking about Roadee, an iPhone nav app that depends on the open sourced openstreetmap.com. That eliminates the high fees paid to license map data, and allows a nav app for under 2 bucks.
Read all about it here!
Clark Asay helps the Foundation with many issues around the license transition and couldn’t be at the State of the Map conference in Amsterdam last month for all the fun in-person discussions around it. So we thought we’d print a map and have the attendees sign it as a note of thanks. And here we are, so thanks Clark!
Check out the map above that RichardF highlighted in this post some time ago. It shows OSM data coloured by the editor software. Blue is potlatch, red is josm, green is merkaartor and grey is anything (say, JOSM or imports) since not all editors declare themselves there is an ‘everything else’ category. And of course it was built by the eponymous Matt.
Last month, when Zack Ajmal was planning a vacation to Italy, he set out to find the first thing that a traveler would need in a foreign land: a map. But digital maps of Rome and Venice for his Garmin GPS device cost almost $100. So instead, Ajmal turned to OpenStreetMap, a community-driven maps database.
“It worked out pretty well,” the Atlanta-based engineer says. “I found Open MTB, which had outdoor hiking and cycling maps with not just roads information, but also trails, short cuts and little known routes.”
Check out the MetaPlaces conference in San Jose in September. Good crowd of speakers including yours truly.
As Tyler Bell of Yahoo! is quoted on the website:
“I’m delighted to see this focus on an holistic location aware experience and business. The future of geo technologies has very much outgrown its origins in the traditional automotive sector.”
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