I remember the thrill I experienced when I first used Mapquest.  It seems like such a normal part of my life now but there was actually a time when I couldn’t just sit down and look at a map and get directions from a place on the Internet.  Then Google maps came along with AJAX and let me move the map around without even reloading the page.  It just got better and better.

The problem with the mapping services, though, is that they use copyrighted map data.  If you look at the bottom corner of these maps you’ll see that they are owned by Tele Atlas or Navteq.  That isn’t such a big deal for the end user since Google seems happy to pay whatever licensing fees are required.  Although it does create some limitations on how the data can be used.

On FLOSS Weekly, Leo Laporte’s podcast on Free Libre and Open Source Software, they interviewed Steve Coast of openstreetmap.org.  Openstreetmap can be thought of as a wikipedia of map data. The data comes from freely available government resources but most of it comes from volunteers with GPS devices who have uploaded their paths, labeled the roads, and made fine-tuned corrections by hand.

The result is very impressive.  Check it out and pull up your area.  Not only will you find all the streets, but openstreetmap encourages people to submit walking paths that Navteq and Tele Nav don’t offer.  The reason for this is that those two companies gather data by using very expensive GPS equipped trucks that they drive linearly around the country.  It is a very time consuming and expensive process that doesn’t allow for the thorough level of detail that a community of volunteers can provide.  After all, who cares more about an area than the people who live there?

If you see any errors, you can just click “edit” and rename a road, or clarify if it is one-way, or update the map if the path doesn’t exist anymore due to new development.

Perhaps most exciting of all, the data is free.  They offer the data under a Creative Commons Share Alike license, which means that you can do anything you want with the data at no charge whatsoever.  They only request that you credit the source and release whatever adaptations  you make so that others can use it under the same license.

It isn’t exactly as revolutionary as Wikipedia, but the possibilities are interesting nevertheless.  News organizations that pay a lot of money for map information can save a ton of money here.  It could also mean cheaper GPS devices down the road (the prices on these things have been dropping quickly already).

In addition to the website, you can find a number of iPhone applications that use the data by searching “openstreetmap” in the iPhone App Store. I tried out Trails Lite on my iPhone yesterday and it was a pretty cool demonstration of the iPhone’s GPS feature, overlaying my location and keeping track of my path on the openstreetmap data.