Friday, April 6, 2012

OpenStreetMap not yet ready for Prime Time

OpenStreetMap has some things to fix

Since I'm currently in a F/OSS Seminar, I watch with interest for open-source offerings that provide attractive alternatives. (I am not however, a member of the Church of the Open Source. I'm more of a practicing Practicalist. I use open source solutions when I have a compelling reason to do so as in the case of Zotero or when I feel like playing with stuff)

Anyway, after reading the article below, I decided to see if OpenStreetMap was something that I could use. I ran a few sample searches and was quite unimpressed. The most glaring example was my search for the Interlochen Center for the Arts. It's called Interlochen because it lies between Green Lake and Duck lake however the map I was presented had nary a lake to be found.

I'll be back sometime in the future but for now, it's not a particularly useful tool for me...



Wikipedia dumps Google Maps

Trend in the making as another blue chip name loses Google in favor of OpenStreetMap.





First it was Foursquare. And then Apple. Now, it's Wikipedia's turn to switch from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap.

Wikipedia's decision, announced in a blog post, is likely to raise more questions about the company's decision to charge so-called high-volume users of its Maps APIs, which formerly were free. In March,Google started charging between $4 to $10 per additional 1,000 loads to any site pulling over 25,000 daily loads.

Explaining its decision for the switch to the community-created mapping project, Wikipedia's Yuvi Panda wrote:

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