Nestoria Blog

Fellow Nestos!

this weekend I headed off to Limerick for the annual OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference. It was a great event. There was an overwhelming sense of “This is real”. OSM is hitting critical mass in many countries, and slowly finding it’s way into commercial applications.

The presentations could broadly be divided into several categories:

We had ambassadors from several countries describing the current state of play in their corner of the world. The interesting part here was the diversity. Speakers from four continents (and one sub-continent). Very interesting to see the different issues in each market. Holland is ‘done’ while Bolivia is just getting started. One things was constant: in every country the growth was rapid.

Several speakers described interesting commercial and academic applications of OSM. Most impressive in my mind was Wikitravel’s use of OSM in their print on demand travel guides. A very clever mix of online and offline. I also enjoyed Sebastian Schmitz’s presentation of openroutservice.org, and am very hopeful to see more use of OSM by the academic community in the next year. I single these two out because I found them particularly innovative, but there were many others as well, and it’s clear that more and more OSM is becoming a viable datasource for real world projects.

There were several talks about the nature of OSM itself, for example a description of the OpenStreetMap Foundation or a balanced and high level overview of long term threats to OSM.

Finally there were a few representatives from the broader geocommunity with interesting talks from Google and the Ordnance Survey.

Especially interesting for me was the emergence of Cloudmade and GeoFabrik two companies with the business model of providing services around OSM data. It will be interesting to see how long it takes until we see the equivalent in other countries.

I spoke about Commercial Viability of OpenStreetMap describing some of the experiments we’ve done with OSM data at Nestoria and the biggest hurdle we see in making more use of OSM: usability.

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See the pics over at Flickr, lots of the presentations are over at slideshare, and here is a good detailed summary.

Congrats to the organisers for the great event, my compliments to the speakers, most of all thanks to all the OSM volunteers around the world for all the hard work. I’m already looking forward to next year.

One final note about how well we’re doing at keeping our finger on the pulse of changes in the world of online cartography, by my count there were four different Nestoria interviewees in attendance!