

Online Maps: Everyman Offers New Directions - asnyder
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/technology/internet/17maps.html

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martian
Every linguist will tell you that language is always mutating and any
dictionary is a biased snapshot of how language is actually being used. The
same is true for geography. Locals always know the quickest routes, the
shortcuts, the bike-friendly streets. Top-down approaches like Tele Atlas and
Navteq can miss these subtleties.

OpenStreetMap is brilliant not only because it's crowd-sourced mapping, but
because it allows the crowd to define and create new feature types and place-
tags on-the-fly. This means you get a map that shows you where footpaths and
dog parks are, but it also means that there's infinite room for connection
with other services. Flickr's support for OSM tags is a striking example:
[http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/09/28/thats-maybe-a-bit-
too...](http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/09/28/thats-maybe-a-bit-too-dorky-
even-for-us/)

I should also mention that some of my university colleagues are working on map
wiki for cyclists in Minneapolis. <http://cyclopath.org> It is focused on
being a research platform for collaborative map-making.

