Open Location

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Description

Dion Hinchcliffe:

" The world’s best map data is still the provenance of commercial map making companies, but this has begun to be eroded by open location initiatives such as the excellent Open Street Map which is a “free editable map of the whole world” using a wiki-based approach and uses high production value including sophisticated interactive Web interface to let anyone add to and improve the data set, which is entirely licensed with Creative Commons. Initiatives like this will eventually affect the commercial viability of more traditional business models around location. Most location products — such as GPS receivers and online map services such as Google Maps — use data sourced from companies like NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. These organizations are ripe for disruption unless they too adoption open business strategies that offer more participation, transparency, and richness. Fortunately, they have already begun to realize this and NAVTEQ’s user-powered Map Reporter is an example of the kind of response traditional businesses will have to enable open participation in the development of their products over the network. And open location is a good microcosm of the issues that will start to surface as open methods become more common. Will users ultimately be willing to pay mapping companies to access the data they themselves contributed? Will mapping companies be able to maintain the high rates of monetization they have when more and more of their map data is generated by their customers in free products? These are vitally important questions and can be directly translated to industries of all kinds." (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/the-emerging-case-for-open-business-methods/218)