Philanthropic Google?

Saturday, 4 April, 2009

There has been a lot on the GIS blogs recently about “geographically volunteered information”, that is (useful?) geographic information that is made publicly available through (collection and) donation by end users. OpenStreetMap is probably the most famous, but we have the recent launch of the People’s Map (and review at FreeOurData) and announcement by Google that (some) data contributed via MapMaker will become free to download (Kenya at the moment). There has been some discussion at both Mapperz and BrainOff on the issue with, not surprisingly, discussion of licensing. OSM is really that only one that you can pretty much do what you want with, however these are interesting times and there is a huge flurry of activity.