Hi folks, My day job is in the travel industry, and my company is a member of an industry body concerned with the development and promotion of open standards within the industry. An initiative is to be started concerning geographic information and mapping, and I'm keen to take the opportunity to promote OSM in whatever way I can.
In particular, I'm keen to see how OSM could benefit from becoming a tool of choice for travel industry mapping and geodata (thereby gaining us lots of useful map data). I also want to be sure that any standards that get developed as part of our work will avoid taking approaches that would in any way inhibit incorporation of tourism-related data in OSM (consider what it would mean, for instance, if it became the norm to use Google to derive lat/long from a hotel address). As the scope and driving intent of the proposed work isn't yet clear, I can't be any more specific that I have been. I'll know more next week, after the kickoff meeting takes place. However, I'd be very grateful for input prior to that that would help me either inform the participants better about OSM or promote a more OSM-friendly approach to our work. The following angles seem worth pursuing: * OSM is a good repository for any geodata - in particular, it can be a better reference platform than a commercial map service. Caveat: just as a commercial map service has drawbacks here form a terms of use perspective, the OSM licence isn't without its problems either. We have to assume that travel industry use of, say, hotel locations, will sometimes happen in cases where the users do not want to worry about attribution of where they got their data from. It may prove necessary to champion instead an even more liberally-licenced POI DB which could feed imports into OSM. * Lat/long should be promoted as the one true geographical identifier. That is, do not assume that geocoding addresses will yield acceptable accuracy. * Lat/long should be determined in ways that do not taint the data with usage restrictions. Under the heading of general OSM promotion, I'd welcome wide input of ideas that demonstrate its value in tourism. Ideas so far: * Any of the customised paper maps that have been produced, especially ones produced officially by municipalities or for any tourism-related purpose. Links, scans, PDFs etc. would be very welcome for this. * Any tourism web sites using OSM maps in any way. * OpenPisteMaps * Walking/leisure/cycling maps and any with countours, hill shading etc. * 3d maps * Routing services Basically, I'm trying both to win converts and to present OSM as an established and useful standard. The audience will consist of companies who spend money already on mapping, so there could be great benefit for OSM to win over those kinds of friend. All suggestions gratefully recieved, Dermot -- -------------------------------------- Iren sind menschlich _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
