04 November 2008

OpenStreetMap's Lead Out in the Open

I've written many times about OpenStreetMap, but rarely in the context of the proprietary online mapping services. Here's a post that shows why open is better: in several important locations - such as Baghdad, apparently - it's the *only* option:

And when you're done with Baghdad, check out Kabul, yet another place where Google Mapmaker isn't enabled: Yahoo Maps, Virtual Earth, Google Maps vs. OpenStreetMap. It isn't even close.

2 comments:

JamesTyrrell said...

As impressive as the maps of Baghdad are to prove a point, a more interesting trend is in entire countries that don't have roads in google maps, such as Iceland, Georgia etc.

I'm assuming this is due to the cost of including the road maps vs. the amount of interest in seeing those areas for users, this lack of limitation proves (at least to me) that the openstreetmap model is superior.

Glyn Moody said...

Indeed - thanks for the info.