We had the opportunity to speak with Steve Coast, the Founder of OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Cloud Made as well as The Fake Steve Coast. Prior to creating OSM and Cloud Made, the real Steve Coast interned at Wolfram Research then pursued a degree in computer science and physics at the University of College, London. Known and respected highly for his work on geo webs, the real Steve Coast enlightened us in with his thoughts on crowdsourcing, datasharing, open source and the future of the Geo Web. Although there wasn’t any public information about The Fake Steve Coast, we couldn’t resist hearing his thoughts also.

FortiusOne: What perspective does OpenStreetMap take on GIS?

Steve Coast: It’s the Church, we’re the Bazaar. OSM is about community and getting people to map boring places on a Sunday afternoon and in many ways the technology just doesn’t matter - all it has to do is get out of the way. There’s a lot to GIS, there’s a lot of very valid uses, but we don’t have the same notions of top down ontologies and the other engineering paradigms about doing things the Right Way.

The Fake Steve Coast: We like to think of GIS as being like Mad Uncle Jim. He should shave a bit more often and no-one really understands what he’s on about, but he’s fairly harmless, and he’ll die soon anyway.

FortiusOne: How does crowdsourcing impact datasharing?

Steve Coast: Well, we’ll reduce the price of the base map data to zero much as

linux reduced the price of an operating system to zero. I think that will make people realise that their datasets aren’t all as valuable as they think - much as Sun open sourced their OS and languages. Thus with a bit of luck there will be more sharing, liberal licenses and innovation based on all that.

The Fake Steve Coast: We see datasharing as one of the three types of Free. There’s "free as in beer", that’s Google Maps and the top-down approach. There’s "free as in speech", that’s us and crowdsourcing. Datasharing is "free as in BitTorrent", which is some guy in Russia "rehosting" the $3bn spatial database you’ve spent your lifetime on. Sorry about that.

FortiusOne: How do you picture the future relationship between open source and commercial data?

Steve Coast: I think it will look like much of the OS market. Hybrid models such as

Mac OS X - based on many Free projects, closed like Microsoft and almost totally open like Linux. In some markets the race to the bottom will happen just like it is right now with cell phone operating systems.

The Fake Steve Coast: atlasteq:~ wget http://planet.openstreetmap.org/planet-latest.osm

atlasteq:~ sed -e ’s/user="[^"]+"/user="atlasteq"/g’ planet-latest.osm> ourbigproprietarydb.gis

FortiusOne: What is the future of commercial data?

Steve Coast: More liberal licensing, accepting changes from customers (note customers, not community. It’s going to be way harder for them to build that), cheaper, more differentiation with different types and styles of maps.

The Fake Steve Coast: Pwned.

FortiusOne: Please describe the relationship between OSM and CloudMade.

Steve Coast: Much the same as RedHat and other Linux product and service provides’ relationship with various F/OSS projects. We help wherever we can and provide commercially the things that the community cannot. Reliability, scaling, data in different formats/projections, services with time constraints and so on.

The Fake Steve Coast: CloudMade is like the Navy Seals of collaborative mapping. We hire the supermen of OSM and pay them to work on the really hard stuff, e.g. installing Mapnik. They’ve been at it for 9 weeks now and we reckon we might have the test script running in about a month’s time.

FortiusOne: What is the next big thing for the GeoWeb?

Steve Coast: Well many seem to think 3D but my money is on pervasive location - it won’t be a geoweb, it will just be that your phone knows you like burritos after going to a bar. It knows where you are and routes you to a burrito. It’ll disappear in to the background much like email, browsing, cell phones and so on. Who knew that SMS would be such a cash cow for cell phones in Europe? The model will probably be something slightly askance like that, and then it will have been totally obvious all along.

The Fake Steve Coast: Germans. We’re ahead of the curve there. Although Germans don’t do curves, they do really, really precise polylines.

FortiusOne: What do you see as the successful business model for the GeoWeb?

Steve Coast: Advertising has potential as does services - but with the big three not really interested in making money nobody else can be. Expect a shake down if and when they are interested in paying the rent.

The Fake Steve Coast: Buy big monster truck. Mount camera and GPS on top. Drive around world in it. Sell result to Google for $$$$ before they realise people will do this for you, for free. Sell truck to Nokia for $$$$ before they realise people etc. etc. Retire to Caribbean.

FortiusOne: What is next for OpenStreetMap?

Steve Coast: Our conference is coming up (www.stateofthemap.org) next month and we just screamed past 43,000 users. So expect our first crowd source country to be completely mapped (likely Germany or the UK) and a big celebration when it happens.

The Fake Steve Coast: We have this great new deal with Nestoria, the real estate site who use our data. In return for giving them free data, they give us free house moves, so when you’ve mapped your neighbourhood they just relocate you somewhere unmapped.

Which is great, until we finish Europe and have to move to Zimbabwe. Maybe we should get aerial imagery instead.

FortiusOne: What do you think of Google’s new MapMaker?

Steve Coast: I really do believe it’s a poke at their own data suppliers and it’s them that should be more worried than us. OSMs fundamental reasons for existence remain more than intact. We didn’t down tools because of the Peoples Map and we won’t when the next proprietary dataset emerges.

The Fake Steve Coast: So this is 2008 and they finally have an editor that doesn’t work properly, aerial images that don’t line up with the vectors, edit wars in Cyprus and Pakistan, dodgy coastlines, confusion between mph and km/h. We’ve had all those advantages for years now.

But obviously we’re concerned. If MapMaker can combine the success of Orkut, the ethical policy of google.cn, the reliability of Google Groups, the rich feature set of Blogger, the respect for source copyright of YouTube, and the widespread impact of Knol, we’re laughing. Sorry, I mean ’screwed’.

Seriously. We started OSM in 2004 because though Ordnance Survey had a complete map of Britain, it wasn’t open. In 2012 Google might have a complete map of the world but it won’t be open either. The world still needs OSM.

Popularity: 30% [?]

With Monday’s unveiling of Google’s Map Maker, Google account holders now have the ability to edit and add to certain Google Maps. The Map Maker currently only allows for map editing in a select group of countries including Cyprus, Iceland, Pakistan, Vietnam and the Caribbean nations. Functions of the tool include custom map creations, borders and regions, places of interest and road networks.

ESRI released their downloadable application, ArcGIS Explorer 480, this week. The upgraded version still offers the same basic function of geoprocessing services, but with major improvements such as KML improvements and increase in performance.

Nokia acquired Plazes, an LBS social mapping network. Plazes provides updates of friends’ activities in a find me/follow me type of service. The social mapping application will take Nokia one step closer to “bringing people and places together” and also acknowledges the rise and demand of LBS.

Microsoft and Virtual Earth launched a program that allows state and local governments to share their imagery, called GoVE. All of the imagery from these governments, municipalities and aerial photographers gets sent to Microsoft, which in turn is published by Virtual Earth.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Came across a great data set on Finder! (thanks Laurie) yesterday that shows how bringing the worlds of GIS and the GeoWeb together can be insanely useful. This dataset shows the 500-year flood plain for Johnson County, Iowa. This includes Iowa City. Making highly detailed and technical data easy for people to consume could potentially save lives. If you’d like to check out the Data you can grab it HERE . Download it in Google Earth, ESRI, or as a CSV. I’ve added a few screen shots from Google Earth so you know what you’re getting.

In this picture you can see that the flood level would have a serious impact on the Airport.

This picture puts a lot into perspective, Front and center in the image there is a running track, and what looks like 4 baseball fields.

Here is another example to show the extent flood plain.

Popularity: 18% [?]

As the outbreak of Salmonella Saintpaul from raw tomatoes spreads throughout the country, we thought it would be good to track the cases over time. You can find all of these updated datasets, ready to be mapped, at Finder!.

This map, made from the dataset Cases of Salmonella Saintpaul All Updates shows the spread of the outbreak throughout June.

Finder! also has datasets on the areas in the U.S., Canada, Guatemala, and Mexico whose tomatoes have been declared safe by the CDC. This map shows those places as of June 20^th. Canada, Belgium, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Israel, Netherlands and Puerto Rico are also included on the safe list.

Knowing which states have safe tomatoes can be helpful but sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly where tomatoes in the grocery store came from. Shopping at your local farmers market is a good way to be sure of the origin of your fresh produce.

Finder! has datasets on farmers markets that provides not only the location of the market but hours of operation, contact information and much more. Just make sure you ask the farmers if the products for sale are from their farm and make sure you are in a state whose tomatoes have been declared safe. Here is a map of our California Farmers Market dataset.

So check out Finder!, check out your local farmers market and enjoy your fresh tomato salsa again!

Popularity: 16% [?]

In my last blog entry I discussed how rising gas prices have turned people to use the public transportation system at a much higher rate. This blog will be a slight continuation of this theme as I discuss the impact that the increase in gas prices has accounted for an increase in the purchase of two-wheel vehicles.

Many people are finding that the increases at the gas pump are becoming financially frustrating. To combat this, many people are finding transportation that can save them money and also allow them to commute to their destination in a timely fashion. One answer to this is a two-wheel vehicle.

From the traditional bike to the new-age Segway, people are running out and buying these vehicles to save money. Sales and use are up dramatically and people are finding many advantages to using a vehicle such as a scooter. Many of these vehicles get great gas mileage and some simply run on electric power. The Electric vehicles are also much kinder to the environment.

Provided below are a collection of different two-wheel vehicle dealerships throughout the USA. So if you are tired of paying to much money for gas in your 4-wheel vehicle consider visiting one of these dealerships and ride off in your brand new two-wheel vehicle.

• Bike Shops
• Harley-Davidson Dealership Locations
• Genuine Scooter Company Dealership Locations
• Tomos Dealership Locations
• Vespa Dealership Locations
• eGO Vehicles Dealership Locations
• Segway Dealership Locations

Popularity: 11% [?]