There were a number of comments on yesterday's 'You shall not remit OpenStreetMap':
- Richard Fairhurst points to quantity, coverage, scaling and 'less aggro' and the widely accepted fact that "OSM can be better than any other mainstream data source - whether OS or TA/NT"
- Dave comments on OSM's London homestead and the strong contribution from there
- Muki Haklay emphasises that "in the crowdsourcing way you can have good quality, reasonable and useful coverage and effective basis for GIS analysis without paying a lot for the data" and "not trying to have perfect accuracy and quality unless you need it"
- John McKerrell rightfully states that Muki's goal was to "quantify the levels of quality available from OSM data" and claims that CloudMade being mentioned appropriately.
- Well in the middle Steve Coast just yawns that "(...) Wikipedia will never work either!" (without taking up the argument).
So let's do all at once and add some spice.
Coincidentally Denis Zielstra from the University of Bonn provided first results of his diploma thesis, where he repeated Muki Haklay's comparison of OSM with data from Tele Atlas Multinet.
The poster is in German:
- OSM data from April '09 is compared to Tele Atlas Multinet 2008/01 covering Germany
- length and differences of street segments are calculated
- OSM data decreases in rural (less urban) areas
- OSM is better than TA in metropolitan areas and covers more pedestrian ways and smaller streets
- preliminary conclusions:
- heterogeneous data quality within OSM
- good OSM data within metropolitan regions
- OSM generally provides good positional accuracy
Without anticipating the final analysis: Muki Haklay's analysis seems to apply to Tele Atlas data in Germany.
Now let's shed some light on CloudMade and release some of Steve Coast yawning that "(...) Wikipedia will never work either!".
In mid '08, Sunstone Capital A/S invested a whopping 2.4m€ into CloudMade, the commercial venture run by OSM founders Nick Black and Steve Coast. CloudMade offers a set of free Mapping APIs, Tools and Services and seemingly intends to make money from paid professional services.
Counting from the Team page, there's well over 50 people working in the US, UK and Ukraine. Even by modest standards, Sunstone's injection should have gone quite a while ago.
Now "under the guidance" - or having taken over or extended the investment of Sunstone Capital A/S - by Progression Partners, a venture capital firm with Juha Christensen and Christian Petersen, who both serve on CloudMade's board, CloudMade's "commercial interests center on street map parity along with depth & breadth". As Marc Prioleau, CloudMade's recently appointed CEO, coming from deCarta is cited "Monetization will come eventually", one could wonder where the money should come from as long as the CC-SA-BY-licence effectively prohibits commercial use of OSM-data, the ODbL won't change much and free products don't add to a positive cash flow.
Even if OSM data will get better and cover flat world more quickly (I am the last one to doubt that) - How will CloudMade make money from volunteered contributions without violating OSM licencing schemes? Even if monetization will come eventually, investors like events of that sort. However - not my cup of tea.
The (admittedly provocative) statement "Is the active crowd made up of a handful of (paid?) CloudMade activists?" probably needs some clarification. At the Where 2.0, I talked to some OSM's "community ambassadors" trying to understand what they're up for. It seems to be a mix fixed salary and profit sharing: the more data volunteering contributors managed by a (CloudMade) community ambassador bring in, the better the payment. If it is handled alike, it smells a little bit.
If there's a community collecting data at no cost and business models will eventually emerge to support ad-based, donation-based revenues (quote Marc Prioleau), ‘Volunteered Geographical Information’ (VGI) is a nice leverage for CloudMade ... but still: it's far away from Wikipedia.
How about switching to constructive mode as you try to do elsewhere?
It's pretty much as the situation with navigators. You buy a navigator (product) that uses map data (which you usually acquire separately).
Yes, Cloudmade has done quite a bit for the OpenStreetMap community. It has sponsored events like State of the Map, donated towards new servers, helped write some of the core API and help raise awareness of OSM, but in terms of actual data collection, the impact of Cloudmade and its employees is imho fairly minimal. Nearly all of the more active countries in OSM such as e.g. Germany, Netherlands, Australia Cypress to name just a few have had no help from Cloudmade. In fact as far as I can tell, the only country where Cloudmade has had a significant influence on the mapping community has been the USA and perhaps the UK, although the latter more due to the fact that they hired the previously existing community than their venture capital creating anything new. So I would think that if Cloudmade stopped existing tomorrow, OpenStreetMap would not change much at all and the community would continue to thrive just as much.
What makes Cloudmade interesting is that it shows one can use OSM data in a commercial environment and it has helped other companies to use it too.
Coming to the original point of data completeness, I think we are all very aware of the fact that in many respects OSM data can't quite compete with other data providers yet, especially on road and car navigation completeness. On the otherhand in an increasing number of areas it can can compete or outperform, be it due to less restrictive license or the higher accuracy of certain features like foot or bicycle paths. It all depends on what you need the data for. Thanks to the work of Muki Haklay, Denis Zielstra and other efforts like e.g. http://osm.gt.owl.de/Strassenliste/map-nordrhein-westfalen.html the data quality of OSM gets increasingly predictable and one can better judge when one data set is more fit for purpose than the other.
Healthy competition is always good though and we will see what happens in the next few years...
AMM
P.S. I have no relation to Cloudmade and am just a OSM mapper.