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Crowdsourcing high-quality maps Philipp Kandal / @apphil 9th May 2012

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About skobbler

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skobbler is all about Maps!

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC-BY-SA).

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The skobbler Market Performance.

skobbler has been a resounding success with over 2 Mio. Customers on OpenStreetMap data!

Top selling paid iPhone constantly in the Top 10

Top grossing iPhone app in Germany constantly in the Top 5

One of the the 10 most successful paid iPhone apps in Germany in

2009,2010,2011

One of the the 10 most successful

2 years+ top selling iPhone navigation app in Germany since

its market launch

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Why de we need open maps?

Maps are at the core of all mobile location based services but insanely expensive

6 $8.1bn

$4.3bn

$500m+

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OSM goal: Democratize maps and make them freely usable and adaptable for everybody

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Customized routing for groups which traditionally can not navigate (well) with commercial maps

Wheelchair Bicycle 88

Pedestrian

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Open: Points of Interest / Locations database

  Could become core location database for services like 4sq, GoWalla, Facebook places

  Local search services

  Note: Any changes to the data itself are also open-source. Linked data (e.g. reviews) can remain proprietary (current license understanding, not validated in court, etc.)

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OpenStreetMap in a Nutshell

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OSM is the Wikipedia of Maps and will make other maps obsolete

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OSM shows impressive growth

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Growth of Nodes, Ways and Relations

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14 14http://vimeo.com/itoworld

15 15http://vimeo.com/itoworld

OSM is fully flexible and not a hierarchical map. Anybody can map anything

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Streets Locations 16

Public transport

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC-BY-SA).

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Key benefits and risks of OpenStreetMap

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The map is free

-  No license costs -  Usage in all formats

mobile / web / automotive, etc.

-  Proprietary tech can be used (not data!)

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The map is very feature rich

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC-BY-SA).

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OSM is flexible – it was never targeted for only one single use-case

-  Tag based structure vs. hierarchy based

-  Full OpenSource tool chain available

-  Advantage and issue at the same time

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Maps are fully customizable to the extreme

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license (CC-BY-SA).

Map data can be mixed (e.g. with NASA elevation data)

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Technical challenges – OSM maps come without formal QA

  Build an extensive AutoQA center (e.g. route length, turn restrictions, etc.)

  Cross check data with e.g. FCD probes

  Fix common tagging issues

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Legal risks

  OSM community watches carefully over Copy-and-Paste from other maps

  Nobody can guarantee that it’s free of copyrighted data

  Mixing your data in makes it OpenSource as well

  OSM data can have significant issues (e.g. broken highways) which for navigation could cause safety issues (theoretical risk)

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Key components for OSM success

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Community driven project

-  Over 600k contributors -  Open Structures and

organization (OSMF) -  Issue: No quality

assurance of map

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Viral nature of license

  Data is under a GPL like license (CC-BY-SA / ODBL) which enforces further sharing of derived data

  Commercial usage is allowed in any form as long as the data is kept free and open

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Good tool chain to edit maps comfortably

  JOSM: Great Java tool to edit maps

  Potlatch: Web based default editor within the openstreetmap.org site

  Lots of special case editors (e.g. for POIs, etc.)

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What’s next

MapDust: Crowd based map error reporting

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC-BY-SA).

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Enhancing the map with Floating car data

  Use a “Waze” like approach to collect floating car data probes to enhance the map

  Detect things like “movement speed” and turn restrictions based on driving patterns

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In-Door Maps

  Provide detail floor level guidance

  Map exits and entrances to the buildings

  Map connections within the building

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3D buildings

  The visual quality of the map is enhanced a lot by adding realistic buildings / landmarks to the map

  Can be used as orientation on the mobile device

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Public Transport

  Live transit information is not openly available at the moment

  Information is key for further innovation in navigation / map space

  Licensing the data is very expensive and cumbersome

Good further readings on OpenStreetMap

  Abalakov’s thoughts on OSM: www.abalakov.com

  OpenGeoData Blog: http://opengeodata.org/

  OpenStreetMap Mailing Lists: http://lists.openstreetmap.org

  OSM Wiki: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org

  MapQuest dev blog: http://devblog.mapquest.com

THANK YOU for your kind attention! Get in touch: Philipp Kandal, philipp.kandal@skobbler.com Mobile: +49 172 4597015

Follow me on .com/apphil