Microsoft helping OpenStreetMap

This is exciting news.

Especially here in Sweden (and the rest of Europe?), the Yahoo imagery is quite poor, so Bing could make for a big improvement in coverage.

There was a typo in the article, it should have read
"Microsoft has announced that it will be contributing to any project that is an alternative to anything Google."

What's the status on OSM's licence?

This is when it becomes important.

What? Both the Pope and M$ do something that actually makes sense? In the same week?

OK, it's somewhat offset by the Novell-sells-its-patent-pool s**t (they should have contributed them to OIN, dammit), but still …

The big picture is that map data is a natural monopoly. And even Google probably agree that it doesn't make sense for that monopoly to be run by a for-profit company.

In a joined-up world it also doesn't make sense to try to divide the monopoly geographically, as happened historically. Nobody wants to buy map data from sixty different countries, each in a different format, with inconsistent rules about what terms mean ("Oh, in Germany, this distinction does not exist, but instead ...") and licensing conditions that bury novel uses in tortuous legal process.

In the past OSM had access to Yahoo images (and I believe that Yahoo may have been one of the sponsors which bought me a pleasant meal after a day surveying a maze-like housing estate for OSM). I'd be interested to hear how that relates to this new announcement. Is it the same images under a new name, an expanded range of images, or ...?

It seems like Microsoft doesn't see much value in having their own data these days (assuming that the point of bing is searching the data rather than the data itself). They canceled Encarta last year, for example. I think it actually makes a lot of sense for them to skip trying to create and maintain the database, which is likely to never be outstanding, and instead focus on writing software to make use of a freely-accessible database that they can contribute a bit to. If you can't have notably better maps than everyone else, you can at least make sure that the best maps are ones you can use, and differentiate your products on something else.

It's not really a new strategy for Microsoft, even; consider how much encouragement they gave to PC clones starting in the 80s, including sharing a lot of information on how the hardware would have to act in order for Microsoft's OSes to run, when IBM might have preferred not to have an open standard. Microsoft wasn't going to get big margins on hardware, so they made sure nobody else would either, letting the competition drive down hardware prices and leaving people's budgets free to spend lots of money on software from Microsoft.

This is a smart move for Microsoft. And hopefully it will further the cause of openness for map data.

However... my experience from the GPS industry is that users quickly become frustrated with even minor faults in map data. It leads to the routing engine giving you back weird routes, like routes that wander through multiple parking lots, zigzag around through residential areas, or just take streets that are always busy. We had a lot of trouble with TeleAtlas' map data (their US data is terrible).

The worst part is that the people writing the routing algorithms start to put in fudges to "clean up" the map data (scare quotes intentional). These are tested by looking at a few areas on the map that the routing engineer knows well. What he doesn't see is that his fudge usually makes things worse in a lot of other parts of the map. The right solution is to fix the data.

It's hard to crowdsource map data. One of the big GPS vendors-- I think it was Magellan-- rolled out a system that let ordinary users edit the maps on their devices. They also rolled out a way that users could contribute the data back very easily. Unfortunately, what they found is that the biggest use people found for the map editing system was to insert fake blockages on roads they didn't want the routing engine to take! People often prefer to do things the quick way rather than the correct way.

Unfortunately, unlike code, it's hard to audit map data contributions from the community. Linus can check a kernel patch to see if it make sense. But if someone from Podunk, East Texas tells you that there are 5 stop signs on Main Street, how do you evaluate that? Nobody back at HQ has ever been to Podunk. We had this problem all the time when working with map data. Unfortunately, it was usually resolved by shrugging and saying, "well nobody lives there anyway."

The silliest part about all of this is that the data for where the roads are, the signage, speed limits, and so forth is usually known to someone in the local government. It's just that the municipalities don't do a good job of putting that data in a standard format and making it available. Well, ok, TIGER data is available, but it's of poor quality-- much worse than TeleAtlas or NAVTEQ. Hopefully these guys will get more accurate, and better at coordinating with the community, in the future.