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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?"
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.
I've never heard of Foursquare and Gowalla until reading this. As of now, I'm pretty sure Google has the ball for running and maintaining a central and heavily used mapping database in the United States. I see Google Maps being used all over the place on websites for various things.
Heck Live/Bing Maps is being used for Weather.com's radar maps. So instead of some central authority, the De Facto services seem to be doing just fine.
Openstreetmap already contains plenty of points of interest and businesses (not sure about homes yet), its editable by anyone. Lets use it as a framework for adding to this data.
In what way does OpenStreetMap not fit the criteria already?
SteveB.
A good start would be the free release of postal code and mapping data by governments. After all this is information collected with public money, so it should be available to all citizens. The UK has or will release mapping and postcode data. But most countries still only allow the data to be sold for hefty prices. The most ridiculous part is that in some countries the postal code date is the property of privatized former monopolies.
Time for Larry and Sergey to invite the Families to a sit-down at 37.423021,-122.083739?"
Seems like an awfully dangerous place to sit. I'd recommend moving that to 37.42194, -122.08412. Less traffic to dodge.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
There are a limited number of sources for the data that is "what street address is at what latitude/longitude?" which is technically "reverse geocoding". They are:
a) The government
b) Private companies who spend lots of $$ gathering the data
In the U.S, the government sources are:
a) The TIGER database - this is not good enough for the task, but it's free
b) Local city/township and county governments - this is the very best data when it exists, but it doesn't exist in lots of places, and it's hard to get in many places where it does exist
c) The 9-1-1 system often has their own source of address data which is used to figure out where you are when you call from a mobile phone
In the U.S. the private sources are:
a) Navteq
b) Tele Atlas
All of the other places that seem to have data actually get it from the above sources one way or another. Sometimes, they have auxiliary data like satellite images or street level images, but the database that links street addresses to geocoordinates comes from one of the above sources. Note that Navteq and Tele Atlas try to get the local city/county data when they can. When they can't they "drive" streets with a GPS equipped vehicle, clicking on houses and other buildings as they go. The 9-1-1 system does the same. The city/county data is actual map data, with polygons for streets, parcels, etc. It's often hard to get address data from it without additional work because the city/county data is developed for land use planning and tax revenue and not reverse geocoding.
The local data probably ought to be freely available, and it's the most accurate, although often somewhat incomplete source of data. Trying to get free access to TeleAtlas and Navteq data is not going to work, which means getting it from Google, Twitter, etc is not going to work.
Other countries have different situations. As noted above, the U.K. mapping data is available, and is excellent quality.