I’ve never been to one of these mapping parties but I gotta say that I am pretty pumped about the one here in DC on June 20th. CloudMade is hosting the party and it looks to be a really cool experience that I can’t wait to take part in. The deal behind OpenStreetMap (OSM) is that the Open Geospatial community is producing a mapping landscape that will eventually rival the geographic coverage that Google, Windows Live, and Yahoo have had several years and deep pockets to produce. Check out CloudMade’s response to “Why OpenStreetMap?”
You’ll notice right away that in a lot of areas around the world, Google does not have 100% or up to date coverage. This is where these mapping parties come in to play. Companies like CloudMade (who by the way is run by the founders of OSM) get a bunch of folks together and provide them with GPS unit if they don’t already have them. They send these folks out around the town to collect data for the area and at the end of the day it is uploaded (I suspect under heavy CloudMade supervision) to the OSM servers and voila! You’ve got brand new data that describes the geographic context of the area around you. The whole thing sounds pretty sweet to me, plus it will give us something different to do since we are completely new to DC anyway. Please be sure to register for the DC event here if you haven’t already!
More from Adam Estrada
- Open Street Map (take 1)
- SpatiaLite 2.4.0
- Oracle Spatial and USER_SDO_GEOM_METADATA
- GeoDC Kickoff…
- ESRI FlexViewer and Error 1065
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