Who is using openstreetmap

In , when the island of Haiti suffered from a 7-point magnitude earthquake , the OSM community needed just a couple of hours to map the whole island from satellite imagery, which allowed relief workers to properly coordinate rescue missions and save many lives, while commercial maps had no way of responding in such a short duration. The more recent Nepal Earthquake saw the contributions of over 2, volunteers mappers responding to the crisis within 48 hours. This community is also what ensures the high quality and granularity of OSM maps.

Although Google spends quite a lot of time and resources on keeping maps up-to-date, its data quality is not necessarily better than OSM. In many, especially less developed areas, the OSM community has managed to gain even higher data granularity than any other map source.

Commercial map data suppliers usually focus on updating map features which are most profitable to sell. Since the OSM community does not have to worry about selling maps, it allows the community to be creative and make maps focused on hikers , cyclists , physically challenged , sailors and practically any interest group. You can map crops, the number of windows on Empire State Building or even the age of a particular tree. Telenav has started using OpenStreetMap data in their Skobbler navigation app.

In fact more and more major organizations are choosing OSM for their maps. There are two main reasons for that. First of all, the flexibility. The second reason is that OpenStreetMap is and always will be available for free to users, developers and companies. It even allows you to download all of the map offline if you need to and render it in your own language. Apart from the maps itself, the OSM project is supported by a range of mature open source software projects that are evolving much faster than any closed sourced competitor.

Some notable examples are the mapnik cartographical library, osrm routing engine, nominatim geocoding engine, leaflet js map library, turf geospatial analysis library, apart from the numerous services and experimental tools being offered by mapping platforms like Mapbox and Mapzen. It is a great mapping service. No doubt. The cost of privacy and loss of control over what we see on the map. At the end, Google is an advertising company and it uses our geographic search results and location information for marketing purposes.

It also chooses which data are relevant to you rather than displaying on the map what is actually around you. No map is. But when you consider all pros and cons, maybe Google Maps is not the best solution for all use cases. There are many applications where the map should be treated as an important public good, rather than a commodity controlled by large organizations.

At the end, why would you rely on a global corporation to tell you what is the name of a street in your own neighborhood? Aleks Buczkowski tiene muy buenas respuestas a esta pregunta, hasta el reto de adquirir los conocimientos necesarios con […]. Einen interessanten Artikel dazu hat der geoObserver jetzt bei geoawesomeness. Aspekte, die betachtet […]. To see more examples of uses of OpenStreetMap, see our weekly featured images. Who uses OpenStreetMap? Next: What's new with OpenStreetMap?

CC-by OpenStreetMap. If you have questions, ideas or just want to meet fellow developers, contact the OpenStreetMap development community. We also listed some books related to software development with OpenStreetMap. You may also wish to see the list of other projects collecting free geodata.

It's easy to use data sources that use OpenStreetMap data within a web application. From Javascript, common ways to do this include using Leaflet or OpenLayers. Lots of other options exist for other frameworks too, including commercial ones that work in a similar way to commercial offerings that work with non-free data.

See switch2osm. If you want create your own data source that uses OpenStreetMap data see switch2osm. Other options also exist, for example for vector tiles rather than raster. OpenStreetMap has created a unique curriculum that is focused on introducing the topics that OSM addresses: mapping, open source technologies, crowd sourcing and community efforts.

It is geared towards university level students. Further, OpenStreetMap has several open problems which would make good student projects. These are items that need researching and "longer-term" issues which could be worked on by students as a project separate from the core open source development progress happening within the community. See our Research page for details of academic research work.

From OpenStreetMap Wiki. Purge Help. Using OpenStreetMap - Other languages. Other languages Translate. Sea map OpenSeaMap.