Why bother with OSM on your iPhone?
Ed’s Parsons amongst others, has picked up on Mikel’s iPhone hacking activities. Mikel has tweaked his iPhone so that it displays OpenStreetMap maps, rather than Google’s. Ed says:
‘Now in my mind this is one of those things that is cool that is can be done but actually nobody would do for real unless maybe they lived on the Isle of Wight, and whats wrong with Google maps anyway’
We can think of a few good reasons why someone would want to do this.
First, you can (without getting sued) - OSM data is provided under a CC-by-SA license, so you can do what you want with it, so long as you attribute OpenStreetMap and you maintain the CC-by-SA license. The whole point of OSM is to allow people to do interesting things with data - like putting it on mobile phones, something which the Google Maps license forbids. Mobile application developers wont get a cease and decist from OSM.
If this is too niche, consider that OSM is current - OSM data is updated by over 15,500 volunteers, distributed across the world, realtime. If you make an edit to OSM data the changes are immediately available to anyone. There is no ‘validation layer’ and tiles served from openstreetmap.org are continuously re-rendered.
OSM data is richer than Google’s. OSM contains all manner of points of interest - pubs, car parks, shops and amenities - it even contains building outlines in some areas. Google’s data is largely limited to roads, some (not all) train lines and train stations.
Google’s maps are one-size-fits-all cartography. Google don’t produce cycling maps, countryside maps or other special interest products. OSM do, and as the richness of the dataset continues to improve and as the number of contributors to the project continues to rise, we are going to see more and more special interest products that fulfill a multitude of niche needs.
A few people will hack their iPhone to show OSM maps this year, probably for fun. But ultimately crowd sourced data like OSM’s is going to provide a richer, more current, global dataset than any closed source alternatives.
October 30th, 2007 - Posted by in cloudmade, geodata, openstreetmap | |
on October 31st, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Does Google contain train stations? Whenever I look for train stations, I find using Google is a complete waste of time, and revert to OpenStreetMap, even in areas where there are virtually no roads showing up around the station.
Last night I made the mistake of using Google Maps to look up a post code. It was over a mile out from the real location, thus making me an hour late for work. On the other hand OpenStreetMap was only one street out, about a few hundred metres. Maybe OpenStreetMap has more data, or more importantly more reliable data than I previously thought. With hindsight I’ll use OpenStreetMap as a first choice more often.
Next up is to try and get the rest of Edinburgh named after someone has gone and traced all the streets through the Yahoo satellite images.