Nestoria UK Blog

Greetings fellow Nestorhamians!

One of the things users like most about the property search results on Nestoria is the way we use maps. So it’s only natural that since day one we’ve kept a close watch on innovation in the online cartography space. We regularly interview thought leaders and innovators, we’ve sponsored projects like Mapstraction and Living with Dragons, and spoken at the odd industry event. Along the way we were very proud to be cited by Google as the Google maps case study.

Today we’re happy to play a small part in another milestone on the long path of neogeography innovation. Like many folks in the geocommunity we’ve followed OpenStreetMap with interest. Started in 2004, OSM is a volunteer project to map the world. At first glance that might sound absurd, but keep in mind that Wikipedia sounded silly at first as well. Today Wikipedia is used by literally millions of people every day. Similarly, most of the software used to power the internet was created by volunteer driven projects.

Nevertheless, many people are skeptical that this sort of community driven data collection can work, that it can actually create usable data.

Fair enough, seeing is perhaps a steps towards believing. We’ve created a parallel version of our site that uses maps from OpenStreetMap maps rather than the traditional Google maps. Every page on our site can also be viewed in OSM mode, so folks can do a head to head comparison.

Here’s an example, a screenshot of Chelsea with an OpenStreetMap map:

and here’s a screenshot of Chelsea with Google maps:

As you can see the OSM maps in many part of the UK are very good. Have a look for yourself at openstreetmap.nestoria.co.uk, or by simply changing the www in any Nestoria search results page URL to openstreetmap.

OpenStreetMap seems to really be gaining momentum. If you aren’t familiar with the project, please check it out. Recent highlights include the donation of some large geodatasets by commercial organisations and municipalities that realize the community is better placed to maintain the data, and the comprehensive mapping of several large cities. OSM is now used by several universities, including Oxford.

One of the key advantages of OSM is that it’s volunteer driven, meaning maps can be made of anywhere people feel like making maps of. There are many parts of the world professional geodata companies don’t focus on, for understandable financial reasons. As examples, OSM volunteers have recently mapped Stanley in the Falkland Islands, cities in the Philippines, and will be carving up India in February.

One question this experiment will no doubt raise is whether we plan to move away from Google maps. No, we don’t. Google maps are excellent. It’s been especially impressive to see the functionality continue to evolve (and push others in the industry to improve) over the last two years. As believers in the open source movement we wanted simply wanted to create a way to highlight some the amazing progress of the volunteers behind OpenStreetMap.

Some technical details for those interested in how it all works. To be honest it was pretty simple thanks to Mapstraction, and the amazing flexibility of the Google Maps API. Anyone interested in embeddable maps, or even javascript in general should check out Mapstraction. Andrew Turner recently wrote a great tutorial; a good place to start. Also perhaps interesting is our interview with Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap, from last year.

On a final note, this experiment isn’t just limited to the UK, we’ve also created the same OpenStreetMap version of Nestoria in Spain. Just surf to openstreetmap.nestoria.es and let the fun begin. In general Spain is less well mapped, though there are some areas like Sol in central Madrid that are very comprehensive.

Enjoy, and, as with everything we do here at Nestoria, please let us know what you think.