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OpenStreetMap part of detailed new maps of Afghanistan
Hey, I just saw this article on Hacker News and decided to share it with you all:
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An innovative small business called Cazoodle is using public data sources like Flickr and OpenStreetMap to build detailed guidebooks for American soldiers.
There's no handy Yellow Pages you can refer to, and the maps don't have that much detail. However, if you go to Wikipedia you can pull out basic information about a town like Pul-i-Alam, and then look through the OpenStreetMap data for Afghanistan to spot [tagged] locations
Coordinates can be pulled out of the geotagged photos [on Flickr] ... without realizing it, photographers are helping to build up a crowd-sourced map of everywhere they shoot. This isn't completely unprecedented; during World War Two the BBC appealed for holiday photos of the beaches of Normandy for an exhibition. In fact, the 9 million snaps received were used to research landing sites for the coming invasion.
Read the full article at
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/02/fighting-a-war-with-a-search-e.php
OpenStreetMap is more than a map, it's a giant open database. I like how the article describes the business side of open data. Entrepreneurs use it for decorative work, like these map blankets ( http://pistilsf.com/ ) and professional work, such as this map for the US military.
This use of OpenStreetMap speaks to its accuracy and usefulness in remote parts of the world.
Thanks for the link, Nick. This is inspiring.