OpenStreetMap: User-Generated Street Maps

The OpenStreetMap project is a knowledge collective that provides user-generated street maps. OSM follows the peer production model that created Wikipedia; its aim is to create a set of map data that's free to use, editable, and licensed under new copyright schemes. A considerable number of contributors edit the world map collaboratively using the OSM technical infrastructure, and a core group, estimated at approximately 40 volunteers, dedicate their time to creating and improving OSM's infrastructure, including maintaining the server, writing the core software that handles the transactions with the server, and creating cartographical outputs. There's also a growing community of software developers who develop software tools to make OSM data available for further use across different application domains, software platforms, and hardware devices. The OSM project's hub is the main OSM Web site.

Openstreetmap Background

Technological changes over the past 10 years, in combination with increased bandwidth and the ability to provide better tools for collaboration, have led to “crowdsourcing”⁴—a term developed from the concept of outsourcing in which business operations are transferred to remote, many times cheaper locations.⁵ Similarly, crowdsourcing is how large groups of users can perform functions that are either difficult to automate or expensive to implement. Figure 1.

Graph of user and contributions growth to OSM on a monthly basis. The graph shows the accelerating growth in number of users and the rapid increase in data entry measured in track points (Source: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org).