Via @cageyjames I saw the announcement that DeCarta is now providing their services using OpenStreetMap data. It’s tremendous to see more service providers building tools and businesses on top of open data.

It’s this transition from primarily ground-swell supported projects into industry supported efforts that makes them sustainabile. Linux went through the same growth as providers like RedHat and Canonical started putting full-time and dedicated resources to ensuring the continual growth and stability of the projects.

This is perhaps very interesting news to CloudMade, since it sits squarely in their market as well – and also Prioleau, the CEO former-CEO and now advisor of CloudMade was formerly a Vice President of Marketing at deCarta.

CloudMade and DeCarta tiles using OpenStreetMap data

The deCarta tiles show the copyright “CCBYSAODBL”, already including the forthcoming migration to the ODbL terms. There have been many companies that are interested in integrating OpenStreetMap into their products but concerned about the potentially unclear terms or permitted uses of the data that don’t inadvertently expose their proprietary data. Hopefully more moves like deCarta to utilizing OpenStreetMap in commercial products will provide clarity on the benefits and implications to other companies.

Last night we kicked off MappingDC, a local OpenStreetMap chapter for Washington, DC and the surrounding metro areas of Virginia and Maryland. It held at HacDC, a hardware hacker enclave in Columbia Heights Neighborhood and led with much enthusiasm by Serge.

Where traditional OSM mapping parties are about raising awareness, MappingDC will focus on identifying local open datasets, building relationships with organizations, running hyper-local mapping parties to map neighborhoods, and other technology and outreach projects. We brainstormed on initial datasets we could clear up licensing issues such as from DC GIS.

We created a few new sections in the Washington DC wiki page: datasets, mapping groups, and projects. The Datasets is a list of departments or organizations that may have data that would be useful to import and a point of contact and MappingDC member that will reach out to them to work on getting it released into OSM. The mapping groups are to identify who would like to help out with local neighborhood mapping and once there are 4 or so people, setup a day to meet and go out and map it. The last section, projects, is brainstorming around how developers can work on building out useful tools such as geochat, or DC specific map styles such as metro lines, bike routes, or other characteristics that match with local culture and features.

Our first event will be mapping Silver Spring, Maryland on August 8th. Watch the wiki page for more details, subscribe to the mailing list, and follow on Twitter.

We want to build local OpenStreetMap such that it fits within the larger local community. Getting OSM working with local bloggers, transit discussions and planning, and who knows – perhaps powering the National Map?

At State of the Map today in Amsterdam I announced that we were open-sourcing our geocoder. You can get the LGPL-licensed code on GitHub and also check out my lightning talk presentation announcement on Slideshare.

The geocoder was built as part of our FGDC CAP Grant to help GeoEnable Government Tabular Data and utilizes the free and open TIGER/Line street data as well as various address parsing and metaphone components for US level address parsing. Also, not everyone can call to a web-service, abide by the terms of service, or be limited by the speed and amount of geocoding queries.

The reason we’re open-sourcing it because primarily an open-source geocoder has been a sorely missing piece of the open-source geospatial stack. You have storage, analysis, rendering, geolocation, and even routing – but not geocoding, at least not in an active project way. GeoCoder::US has been around for a long-time and well built, in Perl, and despite it’s long-standing solid service at geocoder.us, it didn’t fit our needs.

So instead we worked closely with Schuyler Erle, one of the original developers of GeoCoder::US, to rebuild it in a modular way (in fact he finished it once and promptly rebuilt it again), and also in a popular, modern language, Ruby(that we happen to use as well).

We’re also hoping to engage the community in building out the Geocoder. Right now it has components for the United States – but we hope that others will add components for their countries. OpenStreetMap is coming along very well with adding both ranged, and even parcel level, address data. So a good first task would be to build out an OpenStreetMap data importer.

Feel free to check out the code on GitHub – fork it, let us know what you’re working on, any issues you run into, and how we can make the best, and open-source, geocoder out there. Look forward to more detailed posts on how we built it and how we’re using it in GeoCommons and GeoIQ.

Later this week I’ll head back over to Europe for State of the Map (SOTM), the annual OpenStreetMap conference. Three days of talks, demonstrations, brainstorming, demos, and camaraderie. In fact, GeoCommons is a Sponsor again this year (all three years and counting) with a very exciting and interesting surprise on how we’re supporting the conference.

Of all the upcoming conferences (Open Gov Innovations, GeoWeb, FooCamp) I have to admit I think SOTM is the most exciting. All the conferences are about change – incredible advancements that have come about in the past few years – but State of the Map has gone from a nascent concept, even an activist movement against the complex, and onerous licensing requirments of geospatial data in the UK, to a global phenomenon that is being leveraged by individuals, companies, governments, and global NGO’s.

For verification, take a glance at the OSM statistics. Two years ago there were just 8,000 registered users, last year there were 40,000, and today there are more than 124,000 users! The “Year of Edits” video never fails to leave an audience speechless and amazed. The US WhiteHouse is using OpenStreetMap and projects like WikiProject Palestine Gaza show that OSM is the tool people now turn to in a time of crisis and for data.

On Sunday I’m giving a talk about how we’re using OpenStreetMap in GeoCommons and our private GeoIQ servers: “Enterprise and Government Visualisation Analytics using OpenStreetMap”. It’s just one example of many about the power open and crowd-sourced data has in supporting and growing businesses and serving customer and citizen needs. Other companies such as CloudMade, DevelopmentSeed, and itoWorld are also building out the ecosystem that is necessary for open, community projects to have a longevity.

There is an entire suite of tools that has been given form and purpose because of the huge amount of open data. Mapnik and other map rendering engines have data attributes to style; JOSM, Potlatch, and other vector editing tools are beginning to provide more compelling, and non-expert interfaces for modifying topological, geographic data; GPS export, data licensing, navigation and routing are more problems that have been explored and solved through the OpenStreetMap community.

So I’m excited about State of the Map because it means a result of thousands of individuals hard work and aspirations culminating in a meeting to celebrate what has been accomplished and also set goals to much higher, and diverse peaks. It’s proof that a crazy idea of people running around with GPS receivers can make a real impact.

This weekend, Tim Waters (chippy) noticed that the WhiteHouse is using OpenLayers mapping library and OpenStreetMap basemap tiles in their new Delivering on Change page.

Whether you were already serving your country, or are responding to the President’s call, share how you are delivering on change in your community.Whether it is an hour per month helping those struggling in the current economy, tutoring kids in your neighborhood every day, or anything else, we want to highlight what Americans are doing to strengthen our country.

This is very interesting on several levels. Foremost is the use of government provided (TIGER/Line) and crowd-sourced data (OpenStreetMap) in an official US Government Site. This is definitely an indicator that what were cutting edge tools have reached a critical mass to provide broad usability and appeal. Open Source? check

Looking underneath the hood, the data is provided via a KML feed (), so you can pull the data out and upload or map it however you want. Open Data? check

The site itself, Delivering on Change, is asking citizens to contribute stories and media about their personal engagement with change. This is an incredibly exciting step to ask for people to contribute to national storytelling and character. Citizen-sourced data? check

The new US administration is continually doing amazing, and open, initiatives. There is incredible excitement around Recovery.gov as a testbed for the next generation of transparency and embrace of technology and open data feeds.

Small next steps

My thoughts on interesting applications wouldn’t be complete without pointing out a couple of suggestions. While many defend the default OpenLayers controls – I personally think that implementors should take that next step and apply minor customization to better integrate the look and feel of the map controls into their site. I’ve talked before about how easy it is to change some CSS to replace the controls. Perhaps even just a darker blue background to match the White House blue in the logo. Customized?

Another, less highlighted but very important for Government sites is the integration of accessibility controls. OpenLayers supports map navigation using keyboard inputs – which provides for alternative interfaces to navigate the map. It’s not clear if this is official “508 compliant”, but at least demonstrates the potential. Accessible?

How you can help

So do you want to help make Change, especially with mapping data and technology? Come join us at the Washington, DC mapping party – currently planned for June 20 + 21, 2009 somewhere in DC (details coming soon). Or join a mapping party near you.