Which is the smallest ceremonial county in Britain, yet has the largest parliamentary constituency?
The answer is (of course) the Isle of Wight. Located just off the South coast of England it is quite a special place, and not just because of the Wikipedia provided trivia above. In May 2006 a swarm of mapping enthusiasts (organized by OpenStreetMap) descended on “The Island” to map it out using handheld GPS units. By walking, cycling and driving all the roads and paths that they could they captured all the data that was needed to create a detailed map.
We are now delighted that, as an experiment, when you search for Isle of Wight property on Nestoria we display maps generated by this effort. For example, properties to buy in Cowes.
For Nestoria this is an interesting chance to be part of an innovative proof of concept. As backers of open source software and the geohacker community, we were happy to help when some members of the OpenStreetMap team approached us about being part of this demo. Volunteer mapping is in it’s infancy, but holds the promise of more up to date data and could be a great tool to cost effectively map parts of the developing world. Nevertheless, this is an experiment, we have no plans to switch away from the high quality maps and satellite photos provided by Google Maps.
Speaking of Google, we want to say a big “thank you” for their brilliant Google Maps API. The API, or programmatic interface, (which we use for the maps on Nestoria) makes this sort of experimentation and innovation possible. It’s the same technique that we used to give you tube lines in London.
Google’s been great about continually extending and improving the API and working with developers to allow innovation to flourish. Equally, we’d like to thank all the folks in the global online mapping community who’ve been brilliant about providing tips, feedback, and generally inspired us. The community is a big one with many contributors, but we’d like to single out the following sites for their help and inspiration: Cool Google Maps, Google Maps Mania, Mapping Hacks, Mikel Maron’s Brainoff, OpenGeoData, and nearby.org.uk.
It will be interesting to see where these experiments lead. The pace of new development in online mapping has really acccelerated in the last few years, and we’re excited that Nestoria can play a small part. Already we are thinking of other interesting overlays that we could add that might help you choose your dream home. One that springs to mind is a night time satellite photo - so that you can see what sort of light pollution you can expect. If you have any other ideas please send us feedback or leave a comment.
Update: read OSM’s point of view directly over at opengeodata.org
Join the 
Thanks for blogging about this delightful freebie.
Just want to say thanks!
This volunteer open source mapping is quite exciting.
Read about a student at Durham who has vowed to spend his 3 years at uni without using copyrighted maps.
http://lachlan.rogers.name/?p=97 talks about his website
which is http://www.livingwithdragons.com
like your website a great tool, we looked for a property to rent until we found a place to buy. such an easy site to navigate around and pin point a property