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http://www.openstreetmap.org/

OpenStreetMap is pretty good, and getting better.

What about OpenStreetMap? Some areas are done quite well, especially in the UK, by the looks of things, US mapping is going well too.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/

You can build it on top of openstreetmap.org, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be as illegal as publishing bomb making literature. (US Army)

Two sites that are fine examples of collaborative creation of maps and adding info to maps are:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/
A from scratch volunteer effort to map the world using GPS, as people visit places.

http://wikimapia.org/
An overlay on Google Maps where people can mark their landmarks and comment on others.

Really really nice efforts.

I love these guys. I live in Vanuatu, a tiny South Pacific country that so far has escaped the attention of the Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft map interfaces. The only way we're going to get decent maps of our towns is by doing it ourselves. Thanks to a few thoughtful people from Australia and the US, we now have a GPS and are mapping all the streets of Port Vila, the capital.

Few people have computer experience, but we managed to recruit a young man from a local NGO's youth project, and he's been spending the last few weeks riding around in a local mini-bus run by a family member of his. I've already uploaded some of the raw data, and with any luck we'll have some decent maps of the town before too long.

What I like best about Open Street Maps is that their format is compatible with Google Maps. This means that if the stars align themselves properly, we'll be on the map fairly soon.

They have come a long way:
Birmingham
London
Stockholm
Falköping

There aren't that many people maping (1000?), and you can really make a great differance by just adding all pathways you use for your daily strolls..

They have come a long way:
Birmingham
London
Stockholm
Falköping

There aren't that many people maping (1000?), and you can really make a great differance by just adding all pathways you use for your daily strolls..

They have come a long way:
Birmingham
London
Stockholm
Falköping

There aren't that many people maping (1000?), and you can really make a great differance by just adding all pathways you use for your daily strolls..

They have come a long way:
Birmingham
London
Stockholm
Falköping

There aren't that many people maping (1000?), and you can really make a great differance by just adding all pathways you use for your daily strolls..

In TFA, they are refering to OpenStreetMap, a wiki-style project to create free street maps. (though this is not mentioned in the summary)

OSM are importing the TIGER data. It may just take a few months

OSM wiki

Here in the UK our taxes pay for the Ordnance Survey mapping, but we have to pay for the results. I don't know the exact licencing rules, but it could be that a charity would have to pay to include a detailed map to show where they were holding an event. They could use the OSM map for free. Many cities are very well mapped, but there is still a lot of work to do. I've been doing my village when I have time. I've already covered some features that are not on Google.

NAVTEQ's MapReporter tool to submit updates to NAVTEQ's data by the casual user, Tele Atlas' Map Insight and TomTom's MapShare. But I won't lie, the best map crowdsourcing project is doubtlessly OpenStreetMap.org

http://openstreetmap.org/ is actually open, user generated, user-editable, map content (semi-automated from GPS trails). Why help google when you can help real open source?

For your information, OpenStreetMap uses the OpenLayers.org API to render its maps. The two have very different purposes.

Ever heard of OpenStreetMap (Wikipedia)?
Even though it is not complete in most regions, it sounds very promising imho. And it is free! (as in freedom AND beer)

You can produce highly accurate maps, or details of architecture without having one specific person on the ground collecting all that information. I refer you to the Open Street Map project in the first instance, and Sea Dragon in the second. In the Sea Dragon demo, take special note of the discussion about Photosynth, where they construct a surface model of Notre Dame cathedral using hundreds of photos from Flickr.

So how does this apply to Second Life? Well... take the smarts behind Photosynth, the multi-author sythesis of maps from Open Street Map, the shared envrionment of Second Life where multiple people can contribute tiny pieces to one project, and you end up with a means to produce highly detailed maps of places you want to explore. Is it really that great a leap to presume that some groups might be organising this kind of activity? Is it possible to make models of buildings and cities in Second Life that have exactly the detail you need to plan your special operation? Is the detail you need something that you can put into a public space and not raise too much curiosity?

On the other side of the argument - why would terrorists go and set up their own virtual worlds (the hosting! think of the hosting!) when they can use someone else's virtual world, where the work they do adding features into the game is expected as part of the social contract of that game world?

In World of Warcraft, they can work on training the organisational structure. Everyone who has run a raiding guild knows that it's almost like running a business. You train in recruitment, skills, discipline, project planning, dispbursment of funds, resource planning, supervision and follow up reporting. Again, why would they go to a special "terrorist only" space when they can practice these skills where they are expected to have them? Why invest in all the traceable hardware using traceable funds, when they can just be part of a world where all the stuff they want to learn is already expected to happen?

No, I don't expect that terrorists will be trying to fly netherdrakes into buildings any time soon. If you can dismiss that part of the report talking about "World of Warcraft" and "realistic weapons", and accept that these virtual worlds provide excellent grounds for training specific skills, then the whole idea of "terrorists r in UR raid, setting U up the bomb" becomes a little more believable.

Then you have to start asking questions like... "how can we distinguish would-be terrorists from the normal populace in these virtual worlds?"

Create your own road map?

At Linux Forum 2007 in Denmark, some guy (sorry, I'm really bad with names) talked about the phone and he wanted suggestions on what kind of applications You wanted. Like, how could You use the GPS function in "different" scenarios than normal GPS devices are used for. Some posted a comment in here, suggesting that the phone went into silence mode, when entering a cinema.

Again, my bad memory haunts me, but one of the cool apps would be a location-based calender: When You arrive at Your parents house, You will be reminded to pickup that bag of Your old gismos - or at the (or just near a random one) supermarket, You will get a reminder about buying duct-tape. :-)

The cool part of all this is that You can write Your own programs and take advantage of the GPS and what ever feature of the phone You want to, because the phone is almost completely open - they even have instructions on how to open it physically! By "almost", I mean that the "thing" that makes the calls aren't open (can't remember the details on that), so You can only send AT-commands at it. To keep it as open as they can, the maps in the GPS navigation will be based on http://www.openstreetmap.org/. Again, one of the things they wanted to do also, was masking a application that would record Your movement, so it could be uploaded to the OpenStreetMap project to draw in unknown/new roads.

I must admit that I'm looking forward to this phone - but I'm not planning to buy one just yet.

Please correct me if I'm wrong on anything of the above - I have been drinking allot since Linux Forum... ;-)

For the paranoiacs, Paronamio has been acquired by Google this week (more info here).

"if companies like Flickr keep an e-mail address for those seeing their photos online"
You haven't mentioned it, but I guess you already know about FlickrMap. Flickr is part of Yahoo!, and they're not going out of the competition vs Google / Microsoft and alternatives on the mapping stuff and photos.

Trackpoint logging. I like to have precise logs of trips. I'm not sure why that is useful yet, but the pack rat in me just likes collecting them. One possibility is to be able to contribute to projects like OpenStreetMap, so that we can finally have high quality vector maps unburdened by nasty legal restrictions. A further advantage of user-driven maps is that they can provide "unofficial" data such as hiking trails.

"Its Linux. That means it HAS to be good, right?"

Well yeah. that's why projects like OpenStreetMap are using it (with maemo mapper).

For comparison, Nokia's solution for map-on-phone is that you pay GPRS charges per-byte to download the maps, and pay them per-month to allow the phone to locate itself using cell towers, while paying them per month to allow you to use the phone at all.

The free software version of this idea is that you use maemo mapper on an N800 with a bluetooth GPS, and it downloads the maps for free from any wifi hotspot you walk past. (maps and aerial photos from google/yahoo, creative-commons maps from OpenStreetMap, whatever...)

In terms of handheld development environment for free software ("open-stack mobile phone"), it looks like a serious rival to the OpenMoko, especially since a lot of software is already available for it. Definitely more interesting than the trolltech phone just due to cost.

And compared to a regular phone, well you all know how everything has a cost on mobile phones, regardless of how trivial it appears. Imagine what a few free software ideas could do to the functionality of a phone?

I'm sure the situation is similar in other areas, maps just happen to be the one I was looking at at.

"Its Linux. That means it HAS to be good, right?"

Well yeah. that's why projects like OpenStreetMap are using it (with maemo mapper).

For comparison, Nokia's solution for map-on-phone is that you pay GPRS charges per-byte to download the maps, and pay them per-month to allow the phone to locate itself using cell towers, while paying them per month to allow you to use the phone at all.

The free software version of this idea is that you use maemo mapper on an N800 with a bluetooth GPS, and it downloads the maps for free from any wifi hotspot you walk past. (maps and aerial photos from google/yahoo, creative-commons maps from OpenStreetMap, whatever...)

In terms of handheld development environment for free software ("open-stack mobile phone"), it looks like a serious rival to the OpenMoko, especially since a lot of software is already available for it. Definitely more interesting than the trolltech phone just due to cost.

And compared to a regular phone, well you all know how everything has a cost on mobile phones, regardless of how trivial it appears. Imagine what a few free software ideas could do to the functionality of a phone?

I'm sure the situation is similar in other areas, maps just happen to be the one I was looking at at.

And upload your tracks to OpenStreetMap as you go. Do some good on your trip.

Take a look at OpenStreetMap.

There are actually several instances where OSM mappers have mapped out streets which don't exist on any other publically available maps.

It's called openstreetmap. Why do people keep harping on about GIS and imagery?
In the US (yes, there's more to the planet) so much data is freely available,
and any publicly produced content would be especially circumspect. As for imagery,
well it's out of date the instant you have it so that's pointless, unless you mean
putting your own bird up [But then NASA makes its data freely available] or
floating a blimp around...openstre

There's Microsoft's Live Local and Yahoo! Maps that are also data-filled. But you're right, data is the next intel inside. You can look at OpenStreetMap, the best open data project amongst the community.

I'd say that http://www.openstreetmap.org/ might be the right solution for you sometime in the future. It describes itself as: The Free Wiki World Map. If your street isn't marked you can go right in there and draw it (a GPS trace can be uploaded, which helps).

Its way far from complete yet, but map data is being created at an ever increasing rate and the accuracy of what gets loaded is, from what I can see, much better than that provided to Google by TeleAtlas.

The http://www.openstreetmap.org/ project is
working on making
freely available map data for the entire world.
It might be a good project to visit to learn more
on the available tools and data sets available.
There are elevation data available from 60
degrees south to 60 degrees north and good
satellite images available from NASA.

The solution to all this is to produce "open-source maps". OpenStreetMap has made a start (although they don't appear to have got very far yet).

Mapping would seem to be the ideal open-source type application - it's inherently distributed, so lots of people can work on it in parallel. You don't have to worry about dividing up the workload - each contributor can simply map the area around themselves.

Unlike coding, which is a specialised skill (even more so for things like the Linux kernel), mapping is easy for anyone to do - just go and stand on street corners with a GPS and note the co-ordinates and the names of the streets.

The only thing holding back "open source mapping" is the need to have a GPS unit (you could do mapping by other methods, but realistically, GPS mapping is the most straightforward).

However, if mobile phone companies start to include GPS units in their handsets, then we could be all set for an open-source mapping revolution.