Fossgis: Crowdsourced GI - Alexandr Zipf¶

Tags: fossgis, geo

Alexandr welcomes us to Heidelberg. Probably better than viewing it in open source 3D :-)

Historically, when doing a GIS project, collecting and finding geodata was often the hardest part of the project. Suddenly, free geodata started cropping up: “that could not be, that could not work, that would never be correct”. Two big sources: government/public data and privately-collected data.

Open streetmap is growing and growing. 350000 registered users. 100 million ways. 10^9 nodes. A good example of what open geodata can accomplish is the assistance it renders when there’s a catastrophy like in Haiti. When that happened it was clear that openstreetmap was to be the one to make the detailed maps.

Openstreetmap’s data has widely different levels of data quality. The quality IS rising. Comparison with commercial map data in Germany shows a 30% difference in total street length in early 2009, but that’s down to 2% or so in 2010. Big improvement.

Good point about openstreetmap: it opens up creativity. You can render the maps in various ways according to your preference. Route planners are possible. (If I heard it correctly: there’s even a version for blind people).

A rendering example: http://osmatrix.uni-hd.de which shows the number of users that edited nodes in certain areas: one of the ways in which you can measure possible quality.

Another thing he demoed: http://www.gdi-3d.de, showing openstreetmap data in 3d (with a nice view of Innsbruck).