Open Street Map's further integration into commercial mapping products

MapQuest has recently announced the opening of a secondary beta open source mapping website based on the Open Street Maps engine where community members can post and edit map data that will then be integrated into Open Street Maps and MapQuest products. The announcement also indicates MapQuest may in the near future merge this beta open source map portal with their commercial map portal. The integration of community based map editing and open source data in commercial products has started to become a trend in the commercial mapping world. Other commercial map products such as Microsoft Bing and commercial mapping applications such as ESRI ArcGIS 10 base maps already offer Open Street Map as a product to view alongside their propriety map data. Community led commercial map editing is not entirely new as Google and other map services already allow account members to point out errors and make corrections. What is different in the case of MapQuest is the integration of open source data with commercial data. This continues to push the boundaries of community led mapping and the further proliferation of open source data products in the commercial and public spheres.

Read the full article here.

Open MapQuest Beta

Comments

[Maggi]

Cool! thanks Sam. Also a neat piece on OSM and imagery here, from Steve C: Ramblings from the geofrontier, and here, from OpenGeoData.