On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 10:19 AM, Steve Chilton <[email protected]> wrote: > I have been asked by editor of the Cartographic Journal to write a short > piece on the effect of the release of OS OpenData on the OpenStreetMap > project, and I am just trying to gather my thoughts, and make sure I cover > all bases.
This isn't quite what you are looking for perhaps, but my main overriding thought on OS OpenData is that it would be almost impossible for the OS to give OSM so many benefits without helping anyone else. For all the kinds of data that OSM excels at - road centrelines, parks, footpaths, names etc, the OpenData can be a great assistance as part of our toolchains - helping us spot mistakes and omissions and so on. But all the products that cover these areas are pretty much useless in of themselves - the StreetView map is pretty dreadful to use, the vector products are all chopped-up features only suitable for rendering with the same scales and feature widths as the raster maps they have been intended for. So there's almost no chance that someone can build interesting and exciting things on top of these products without replicating all the work we're doing in OSM. As for the things we can't collect easily - boundaries, post codes and so on, these datasets are functionally complete, but were never going to compete with OSM. I think if I'd been asked to decide what to release with the aim of improving OSM while making sure its not undermined, I doubt I could have done a better job. Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
