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% [?]

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% [?]

Data Transfer Solutions (DTS) developed an application for the Texas Forest service called the Texas Wildfire Data Browser. The application provides viewing for wildfire threats, fuel hazards and fire locations.

In light of the Iowa flooding, MSNBC posted an interactive map allowing users to track flooding locations in the Midwest. The majority of the points on the map give the levels of historical rivers and the others even link to specified news areas.

Google Earth’s text gets a make-over with a new option to view KML texts on the map. Designed by Sergey Devytakov, the new tool, called Labels, allows the specification of font changes, shadows and outlines and choice of icon, etc.

Maps and texts combine through Kvisu.com. This unique search engine takes text based results and aligns them with a surface map using visualized keywords.

Zimbabwe gets on the map. Google Maps has been used to track the political campaign of Morgan Tsvangirai and the unfortunate terror occurring in the country.

Popularity: 17% [?]

After a marathon of 50 plus primaries/caucuses while raising record sums of campaign money and more than a year and half of campaigning that had more twists and turns than a roller coaster, Obama clinched the nomination after crossing the threshold of requisite number of delegates on 3 Jun, 2008 and received the full endorsement last Saturday, from his once bitter rival, Clinton. No doubt, for a young 46 year old black gifted candidate and a one term senator from Illinois this is a cause for celebration and a little R&R. However, the path-breaking presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic party cannot afford to rest on his laurels.

And why is that? Let’s look at the landscape of state level wins/losses. The 3-d map below shows the share of Obama vote in the lower 48 states. The height of raised polygons in the shape of the states with shades of blue/purple and green represent Obama’s share of votes, while the dark red/brown and beige/wheat hues represent Clinton states.

Considering the map above, Obama campaign would do well to realize the challenges that they now face in the race for the White House, both in the states that Obama lost to Clinton (CA, NY, PA, OH, FL, AR, TN, IN etc.), and the states that he won handily (SC, LA, MS, AL, GA, SC, NC, MT, NC, NE, ND, ID, OR, WA, VA, MD, MO, UT etc.). Obama campaign will have to compete with McCain in all those states that are shown in shades of green. It also does not bode well for him that the states that he won in the primary (blue and purple) traditionally vote for a Republican president.

The difficulties he will encounter become visible when one analyzes the landscape of voting patterns in the primaries at the sub-state level such as counties and congressional districts. The map below was constructed from dozens of data-sets available on the Finder!, while the data for the map was compiled from more than 45 on- and off-line sources.

Much of the county level data came from election divisions of each state’s office of SOS (Secretary of State), while the congressional district level data was scraped from from the mother of all election information sites, TheGreenPapers.Com and a few state Democratic parties and news papers. The map shows share of Obama votes by county and by congressional districts, a hybrid born out of the necessity of geocoding the default data available for different jurisdictions in the lower 48 states.

The sub-state level primaries voting patterns with bluish hues are where Obama did well. The areas with the orange and red hues where Clinton did well are the so called “Guns and Religion strongholds“. With Obama’s 50 state strategy, these are the same places where Obama campaign will have to spend enough time and money for the general election campaign. As is apparent from the map, the the rival campaigns will compete with Obama in blue hued areas, at the same time some of the independent 527s could swift-boat Obama by playing up Obama’s pastor problems in the red/orange hued Clinton country. In brief, what Obama campaign has experienced so far is just a primer to the challenges they will have to face during the General Election campaign.

All of the data for these maps, including county and congressional level data is available on Finder!, except for North Dakota and Wyoming, the really red states that appear blue in these maps, mainly because Obama’s win in the democratic primaries and whose respective SOS (Secretary of State) offices have not posted the primary results data yet. For the rest, you may search/download/map the state/county and congressional district level data on Finder! using tags such as ‘elections’, ‘primary’, ‘presidential primary’, ‘democrats’ and ‘politics’.

Popularity: 19% [?]

The first of our series on “Cartography and the GeoWeb” covers the cartography of GeoWeb base maps - one of the most obvious places cartography is applied on the GeoWeb. The tiles from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are nearly ubiquitous in map mashups. As each of the technology giants got into the mapping game, they had to make many cartographic decisions on how they would present data on a map. This leads to a myriad of mapping option ranging from the color palette selected for map elements, to font and to the placement of labels on the map. To see the effect these different choices can have on a base map, check a comparison of cartography for the street base maps of the three providers below:

Yahoo Maps

Microsoft Virtual Earth

Google Maps

When it comes to cartographic design I would rank it 1) Yahoo 2) MSVE 3) Google, which should not be too surprising since Yahoo! hired a bunch of cartographers to design theirs. Since Yahoo! unveiled their new cartography, Google has introduced terrain view and MSVE has added elevation reliefs to their maps as well - although I cannot for the life of me find a reference to when the upgrade happened.

While the race for more content, and sometimes more cartography, has raged amongst the big three providers, there has been a backlash in the developer community. This was most poignantly seen in Paul Smith’s “Take Control of Your Map” article on A List Apart. As you can see in the screen shots above, the base maps from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have become pretty crowded and dense. Many Web designers would like to control the design on their maps the same way they do their Web pages leading to a movement to “roll your own maps”.

This movement has leveraged the pioneering work of OpenStreetMaps to create their own independent base maps for streets. The OSM effort led to creation of applications like Mapnik and Osmarender to style the GPS data they collected for the project, although both are some what notorious for their lack of usability. This has not stopped EveryBlock from using Mapnik to make custom maps for their data.

The map is definitely less busy than the big three providers, and I believe suits EveryBlocks purposes well, although I might have gone with a different color combination. The beauty, though, of EveryBlock’s approach is that if I wanted another color sequence, I could take Mapnik and OSM data and have at it. I believe it is just one of the many examples we’ll see democratizing cartography - allowing the public to “roll their own”.

Popularity: 27% [?]