Open Street Map: mobile maps going from commercial to crowd-sourced

Navigation and location are two of the biggest growth areas in the mobile industry at the moment. There’s a war going on between mobile companies like Nokia and navigation device companies like Garmin and TomTom – and the spoils are consumers. But to make a good navigation or location service, you need a good map. Nokia bought NAVTEQ to get its maps, and TomTom acquired TeleAtlas. But what about smaller companies or developers who need digital maps, but don’t have a spare 8 billion quid lying around? For these companies, the OpenStreetMap Foundation may be the answer they need. This crowd-sourced company offers detailed maps for free to anyone who wants them. GoMo News interviewed OSMF board member Henk Hoff to get a better idea of how the Foundation works with mobile. Henk is scheduled speak at the Navigation and Location Summit on June 15-16 in Berlin. Click here for more information: http://www.thewherebusiness.com/navigationeurope/agenda.shtml

What’s the ultimate goal of the Open Street Map foundation?

To have a freely available map of the whole world. It was started about 6 years ago in London, by Steve Coast, because there were no freely available maps, or even reasonably priced maps! The ordnance survey, for example, protect their data very strictly. Open Street Map was created from the idea that roads are where they are, and if you have a GPS device you can trace back where you’ve been. And if everybody does that, you can generate your own map. And since location and roads are basically public domain, we found it very weird for commercial companies to have copyright on that kind of information. So the Foundation was started to free up the data, and to let more people use it – even if they want to use it in a completely non-commercial way. People will come up with new and exciting ideas for mapping – but not if they have to pay big money for a reasonably sized map.

How did you get involved with OSM?

I started my own company three years ago, and was very willing to focus on location based web services. I stumbled on Open Street Map, and became addicted to creating my own maps. You look at the world differently when you’re mapping it. You see a road that is called “At Your Own Risk Rd” – and suddenly you MUST know what’s down there! It provides a sense of adventure for the mappers who volunteer for OSM.

Will OSM remain completely crowd-sourced, or will it need to go professional to compete with commercial services like TeleAtlas and Navteq?

OSM is based on voluntary work. It combines maps from volunteers working on the ground with existing free datasources. and people mapping on the ground. We have about 300,000 registered users – 10% of these are mapping on a monthly basis. And around 1% of our users are really hooked, and map on a daily basis. These users aren’t evenly divided all around the world, but in many places we are already better than commercially produced digital maps! In Germany, England and the Netherlands, as a sample selection, our roads and points of interest (POI) are more up-to-date and accurate than commercial maps.

Some users are nervous of adding roads, because they are afraid they’ll break something. So we’ve also got tools to just add POIs, like pubs and petrol stations – and that’s an area where we’re definitely better than commercial maps.

What kind of work is OSM doing in the mobile industry?

The core of OSM is providing a freely available map. But there are more and more apps for the iPhone and Android that uses OSM data. There are routing apps, and also a lot of pre-loaded maps of cities. There’s an app that lets you download the map of Amsterdam, and you can download and use it off-line. We’re also creating editing tools for mobile, but mostly for POIs – so you can add the location of a restaurant, what kind of cuisine it does, and its opening times, that kind of thing. But adding news roads is a bit too complicated for apps – you really need off-line editing tools for that.

What do you feel about the future of mobile location?

It’s the next logical thing. The phone got mobile, the internet is getting mobile. We all get more mobile. We are bombarded with information. Location is a way of filtering that information so that it becomes useful.

Can mobile navigation apps reach the same standard as Personal Navigation Devices?

Just look at the development of cameraphones. There are already phones equiped with better camera’s than the regular pocket camera. The biggest challenge facing mobile phones is that they are mobile phones! Sometimes you need to use it for a call, which means you can’t use any of the visual tools of the phone, like a calendar or address book. There are fixes for this problem, like working with headsets, so that you can use the phone for both functions at once. The voice part needs to be moved away from the visual part.

Does OSM deal with mobile application developers, either through SDKs, APIs or other services?

From the Foundations point of view, actually making an SDK is a service that other companies can provide much better. We want to focus on what we really do. Our primary concern is COLLECTING data. We don’t provide an SDK, but we do have a standard API that lets you connect to our database. We also deliver daily (or even minutely) updates that people have the option to integrate. There are third party companies out there making SDKs that make it more easily usable for developers. Cloudmade is one of the most interesting commercial companies that is trying to build on top of OSM. If you’re a hard-core developer we’ve also got a wiki with the information you need. I see a future where there are multiple complanies providing SDKs, and other companies building services on top of them.

To get a better insight into the developing world of how mobile is changing the location and navigation industries, check out the Navigation and Location Summit on June 15-16 in Berlin: http://www.thewherebusiness.com/navigationeurope/agenda.shtml