Open Source Maps Gain Ground as Google Paywall Looms
WIRED.com 
Nestoria is one of those companies that was told it would have to start paying real money for Google Maps. When Google couldn’t tell it exactly how much, Nestoria kicked Mountain View to the curb and switched to OpenStreetMap, a free, collaborative effort to map the globe.
But that’s only part of the story. Nestoria’s “free and open” map data is actually served up by MapQuest, the once and future mapping outfit that ruled the web before Google Maps stole its thunder. At Nestoria — a popular UK-based real estate website — the online mapping game has come full circle.
OpenStreetMap, or OSM, is yet another example of a project that manages to compete with a massive tech company simply by
crowdsourcing a problem. Much like Wikipedia challenged Encyclopedia Britannica and Linux took on Microsoft Windows, OpenStreetMap is battling Google Maps, and at least in some cases, it’s winning.
OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast says the project is “still waiting for the big one.” But in addition to Nestoria and
so many other small outfits making the leap to OSM, some bigger organizations have taken note.
The White House employed OSM to track its Change campaign, and in 2008, the popular photo-sharing site
Flickr adopted the project.
And like many an open source project, OSM has been commandeered by companies looking to catch up with the market behemoth. MapQuest isn’t the only one backing the project. So too is Microsoft.
Where The Streets Have a Name
By day, Steve Coast is one of the lead architects on the mobile version of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. By night, he founded and still
chairs OpenStreetMap, a UK-based non-profit that runs on an annual budget of less than $100,000. As it happens, OSM receives hardware donations from Coast’s daytime employer.
Coast started the “free and open” project seven years ago. He was looking for an alternative to the maps offered by the British government and large companies such as
NavTeq. The big aggregators housed almost all of the good map data, he says, and they knew how to render it, using “tiles” so you could move around a map without having to reload the entire page. And because of this, they could charge an “astronomical amount” for their maps.
OSM was designed to reduce map
licencing fees to zero — a concept that Coast gives credit to Google for landing on first — but it was also meant to improve the accuracy of maps. The project was seeded with satellite imagery, and then the world-at-large was invited to put labels and borders on the images, otherwise known as “volunteered geographical information,” or VGI.
Soon,
volunteers were using GPS units attached to bicycles and car to improve the VGI. Towns and cities began as islands of data, but eventually, the catalog of data spread to the far corners of the globe. Today, the project houses about 19 GB of compressed XML data, and when expanded, it reaches into the terabyte range. Google was actually an early contributor, and both Microsoft and MapQuest are now providing data. Many assume that MapQuest is dead, but it was bought by AOL and relaunched
in July 2010 as “the first major mapping site to embrace and encourage open source mapping at scale.”
According to Pat McDevitt, the vice president of engineering at MapQuest, the company still gets about 40 million unique visitors each month to its site, and it has invested about a million dollars in OSM in an effort to undercut the map licensing fees levied by NavTeq and Tele Atlas (owned by TomTom). “The hyperlocal detail that a motivated community adds is way beyond a commercial provider,” McDevitt tells Wired.
A 2009 paper from University College London said that on average, OSM’s VGI is within six meters or a street or landmark’s actual position. Two years later,
a second paper, from the University of Heidelberg and the University of Florida, found that OSM provides 27 percent more data in Germany with regard to the total street network and route information for pedestrians than TomTom’s commercial dataset.
“We went through a bubble period where we were [just] this free and open alternative — but not nearly as good [as competitors],” Coast says. “But with companies like Microsoft and MapQuest contributing now, it’s way more sustainable than it was four years ago.”
GreenInfo Network — a non-profit outfit that builds maps for (often cash-strapped) public services and environmental groups — started using OSM base maps in 2009 because it provided information the organization couldn’t find anywhere else. OSM’s data is not confined to streets. GreenInfo pulled data on park trails for its ParkInfo application.
“For our purposes, base map tiles available from OSM easily rival, and oftentimes surpass, commercial offerings,” Tim Sinnott, a
GIS specialist at GreenInfo, tells Wired. “And if we find holes or errors in the data, we can edit information along with the rest of the world.”
Google's take on San Francisco. Click to enlarge.
OSM's take on San Francisco. Click to enlarge.
Satellite's take, via Google Maps. Click to enlarge.
Google Erects Paywall
In April, Google
told the world that it would charge companies that exceed certain amounts of usage when adding Google Maps to their sites via Mountain View’s API (application programming interface). Though Google has yet to actually erect this pay-wall, Nestoria made the preliminary list of those who would have to fork over the cash.
Nestoria co-founder Freyfogle says he was already considering OSM and had been for some time. He felt the quality of OSM’s data was at least on par with Google’s in the eight European countries Nestoria served. But when the Google sales rep called this past fall, it put him over the edge.
The problem was that when Freyfogle asked the sales rep how Nestoria would be charged — by API calls, map loads, a licensing fee? — the rep had no idea and ended up quoting an unqualified stand-alone price that would have “bankrupted” Nestoria, according to Freyfogle. He decided then and there to switch to a free OSM setup, and Google hasn’t called back since. “The experience was poor,” he says simply.
Google has since published clearer prices on its blog, and a spokesperson for the company tells Wired that only the top 0.35 percent of sites will be affected by the
new pricing structure, which charges for more than 25,000 map loads per day. But no doubt others will make the switch as well. That’s just what happens when a previously free product is not completely free anymore.
But Freyfogle makes it clear that the switch to OSM wasn’t made as some sort of anti-Google statement. “That’s Google’s business, and they need to run it. I completely understand that,” says Freyfogle, a Fullbright scholar with an MBA from MIT.
Since Nestoria made the switch to OSM, he says, the company has received almost no complaints about the change in its map background. Some users in remote areas of Europe, he adds, have even praised the new interface for the details it provides on their little towns. What’s more, in making the switch to OSM, Nestoria gained some flexibility it never had with Google.
With OSM, developers can manipulate and update map data as they see fit. With Google, they can merely build on top of what’s received in a call to the API, Freyfogle says, and they must render what Google wants them render — a criticism Google did not address when we asked the company for clarification. “You can make your maps look however you want. Rivers can be red instead of blue if you wanted…. With Google you’re not getting any data. You just get a map on your page.”
When Microsoft Lurks
With OSM, the rub is that you have to find a way of organizing your map tiles and serving them up. You can serve your own — a doable but difficult task — or you can go to a third party that will serve them on your behalf, including MapQuest and CloudMade, a company Coast founded but has since left. Nestoria
uses MapQuest, who does the tiling work for free.
But don’t mistake MapQuest for OpenStreetMap. Coast says that because the project is open and so easy to access, OSM actually interacts very little with MapQuest, or any other large contributors, other than a few emails now and again. They’re just part of the community.
The same goes for Microsoft. “We wondered if Microsoft would become what Red Hat has to Linux,” says MapQuest’s McDevitt. “[But] no big company has gone full-tilt with the responsibility for managing the OSM code.” But that could change. Microsoft is contributing data, hardware, and cash to project. And it’s
offering OSM maps on its own Bing Maps service.
Asked whether he thinks Microsoft is helping OpenStreetMap because Redmond knows it can’t beat Google on its own, Coast pauses. Then says he’s not paid enough to answer that question.
Photo:
senorhans/Flickr
