Open Geospatial Data, OpenStreetMap and the OSM community

What is Open Geospatial Data?

With the growth of the internet, information and data can be shared and exchanged on a massive scale. When this is done without payment or obligation in exchange, the data is considered open. When that data is georeferenced, or associated with a particular place on earth, it is generally considered open geospatial data. Much of the open geospatial data available today is traditional data that has subsequently been made public by the federal agencies, governments, and private organizations who created it through traditional mapping activities.

However, a new way that open data is being created has revolutionized our societies. When people create and share data online, the content sources are the users themselves. For open geospatial data, this has been revolutionizing the way we look at and use maps over the past decade. When people everywhere have the ability to create spatial data and share it freely, it is called "volunteered geographic information."

Geographer Michael Goodchild first coined this term, volunteered geographic information, or VGI in a paper that he wrote about "citizens as sensors." The full paper is available here for you to review quickly (also attached below, if you would like to consult it later). Here is the most salient excerpt you need to read:

"The widespread engagement of large numbers of private citizens, often with little in the way of formal qualifications, in the creation of geographic information, a function that for centuries has been reserved to official agencies. They are largely untrained and their actions are almost always voluntary, and the results may or may not be accurate. But collectively, they represent a dramatic innovation that will certainly have profound impacts on geographic information systems (GIS) and more generally on the discipline of geography and its relationship to the general public. I term this volunteered geographic information (VGI), a special case of the more general Web phenomenon of user­-generated content."

Goodchild explains this history and what it means in terms of how we can evaluate and use this kind of geospatial data in this interview that you need to read.

If you are interested in hearing more about the context in which this has happened, just for fun (optional) listen to this NPR talk about how we came to arrive at this world of "open" source.

What is OpenStreetMap?

Among the various projects and platforms created in recent years to facilitate this sharing and exchange of open geospatial information, OpenStreetMap (or OSM for short) has emerged as one of the most widespread and impactful efforts.

"OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the whole world that is being built by volunteers largely from scratch and released with an open-content license.... it is also a project that creates and distributes free geographic data for the world."

Read the main text on the about OpenStreetMap wiki page.

Organizers say they started OSM in 2004 because "most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways."

Read about how OSM came about in the main text given in the project's account of their history here.

Just for fun (optional): Learn 10 more things you should know about OSM from Directions Magazine.

Who uses OSM?

The OSM community consists of over 2 million users and contributors around the world. Learn more about who they are, including some of the organizations that have developed around this map / project by reviewing this page on OSM contributors.

This community communicates over many listservs, some organized by country, and others organized by topic or interest area. Check out this index of OSM listservs and find one that interests you. You may comment about this in the Reflection Question below.

Together this community has accomplished a great deal in terms of making a map of the world that is free and open to everyone You can check out the before and after images to see what contributions have been made by using this tool. However, there are still many places in the world where the data is not available or does not exist in an open, shared and accessible public platform. The images below on this page display before and after shots using this tool of areas mapped by groups associated withwww.youthmappers.org.