PSI partnerships
North Rhine-Westphalia: 19 December 2008
OpenStreetMap has announced two collaborations with German public sector bodies.
The first is a pilot project between the Bavarian State Government and OpenStreetMap to capture the district of Oberpfalz (9691 sq kms). The Bavarian State Government is contributing aerial photography under an agreement (that is in the public domain and published on OpenStreetMap) with OpenStreetMap who will provide the vector data for the roads, buildings, rail networks, overhead power transmission lines and other features. The pilot started on the 12 December 2008 and will end on the 31 March 2009. If the trial is successful then the agreement will be extended to cover all the Bavarian State. The Bavarian State government on the 8 September 2008 initiated the discussions regarding a potential pilot. The contract was signed on the 4 December 2008 and the data supplied on the 6 December 2008 and the first trials had been completed by 12 December 2008. By the end of December 2008 the pilot was progressing well and is on schedule to complete by the 31 March 2009.
The second collaboration is between the Strassen.NRW the State enterprise for road construction and maintenance in North Rhine-Westphalia and OpenStreetMap. Strassen.NRW has provided approximately 20,000 km of motorways, federal, state and county road data to OpenStreetMap.
On the 28 November 2008 OpenStreetMap published a comparison of Google Maps and OpenStreetMap with respect to world cities. The comparison demonstrates the global interest in initiatives such as OpenStreetMap and how societal collaboration’s can compete with both the public and private sector through innovative ideas and concepts.
OpenStreetMap content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
Information on OpenStreetMap is available in 37 languages.
The article: OpenStreetMap: User-Generated Street Maps - The OpenStreetMap project is a knowledge collective that provides user-generated street maps. Authors: Mordechai (Muki) Haklay and Patrick Weber University College London. The article appeared in Pervasive Computing October-December 2008 provided a good background to OpenStreetMap.
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