Towards an Open Geolocation Database

theodp writes "With the location land rush in full swing, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld declares it's time for an open database of places and calls on the Big Dogs of location — Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, SimpleGeo, Loopt, Citysearch, et al. — to make it so. An open database that maps latitude and longitude coordinates to businesses, points of interest, and even people's homes should just be part of the basic fabric of the mobile Web. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley was enthusiastic about the idea (in a standing-up-at-a-cocktail-party sort of way), says Schonfeld, while Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was a little bit more lukewarm and cautious. Time for Larry and Sergey to invite the Families to a sit-down at 37.423021,-122.083739?"

Comments

What's in it for Google?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

For all intents and purposes, Google can implement this themselves and do whatever they want without the help of anyone else in the named list.

When people start saying "for the good of all", they typically mean they want someone else to foot the bill. Of all the weirdo ideas I've heard, Foursquare has got to take the cake. It's really no wonder the CEO is enthusiastic about sharing this info; he stands to gain a huge database and backend for no cost. I suppose when you're bleeding money and you're known as the second coming of Gary Kildall, it might be to your advantage to act enthusiastic about everything and anything that might make your company look better than the crappy Web 2.0 service it really is.

Re:What's in it for Google?

[ultrabot]

For all intents and purposes, Google can implement this themselves and do whatever they want without the help of anyone else in the named list.

I don't think they can. Google doesn't own the map data, they just license it.

OSM

[Mordac the Preventer]

In what way does OpenStreetMap not fit the criteria already?

Re:OSM

[forand]

It hasn't been filled with all the useful information within the above mentioned companies databases.

Re:OSM

[rmcd]

Openstreet map is terrific. What we need, however, is for municipalities to understand that it's in their interest to keep it up to date. If a city could update with information about construction, new developments, etc, it would make OSM at the least an important adjunct to the commercial mappers. Not a lot of work for any one city and a great benefit to all.

I don't see why businesses wouldn't want their location in all available databases, but that's for them to decide.

Open standards, not an open database

[Grismar]

I hardly think an open database is the solution. Having an open standard to access any databases with geodata is far more important. That way, developers wanting to combine geodata in their applications can pick whatever they need and either aggregate the information on the fly or draw any information that is available under the proper licenses into their own database for speedy access.

I'm sure someone around here will be able to point out what standards for this purpose are already around and could be used for such a scheme. If not, then that's the first problem that requires solving. Otherwise, these companies will just enter an endless debate about who owns what and why it should or shouldn't be them controlling such a database.

Re:Open standards, not an open database

[jadavis]

This makes zero sense.

1. There *are* open standards.
2. There *is already* an open database, OpenStreetMap.
3. As someone already pointed out, that open database uses open standards.
4. It seems bizarre to value open standards so much more than an open database. An open database is likely to become an open standard, or be converted if another open standard takes hold. The reverse does not hold true though -- proprietary information is likely to remain proprietary regardless of the existence of open standards (for instance, google maps is a proprietary database).