John McKerrellUsing Crowd Sourced Data in a Commercial Mapping API

Multimap.com

Sources

Geonames

Wikipedia

Wikipedia - Implementation

Taking complete dataset and parsing it

Hosted by Multimap

Updated on a regular basis

Also available on maps.live.com

Wikipedia - Issues

Hard to parse

Special syntax required, people often get it wrong

Some people try to do new non-standard things

Wikipedia - Positives

People were really nice

Email got a quick response and initiated a phone conversation

Aided us in meeting the terms of our license

Weren’t pushy about donating to the foundation

Flickr

Flickr - Implementation

Not released

Wrap calls to their API in our own search API

Was developed over a year ago as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate capabilities of our web service APIs.

Flickr - Issues

Very little mediation

Photos are owned by individual users and other users have little discourse if bad data is entered.

Photos often had nothing to do with the location.

Potential for offensive photos

Flickr - Positives

Looks Pretty!

Geonames - Implementation

Take complete dataset and convert it

Hosted by Multimap

Updated daily

Geonames - Issues

Not a geocoding solution.

Geonames - Positives

Big selection of categories

Reflects local ground truths

Easy to update when omissions are found

Database constantly increasing due to community involvement

Geonames - Effects

One of the UK’s leading travel portals

Hotel search failures fell by 80%

Over 2m queries a month hitting geonames dataset

100% hits on the “British Museum Test”http://povesham.wordpress.com/2007/11/23/the-british-museum-test-for-public-mapping-websites/

OSM - Implementation

Not released

Link directly to OSM hosted tiles as a custom map type

Parse OSM planet placing nodes into Multimap database

OSM - Issues

License restrictions

Coverage

OSM - Positives

Coverage

Tiles could integrate well with our existing tile infrastructure

POIs could integrate well with our existing search APIs

Conclusions

Strength of crowd-sourced data is definitely around many people working on the same data, i.e. not Flickr

Can have really positive effects for minimal effort, benefits are ongoing as projects expand

Can’t build sustainable differentiation

Is there a moral obligation for commercial users of crowd sourced data to donate back to the community?

Questions?

Thank you