Chief among these were Foursquare and Craigslist, which adopted OpenStreetMap, and Apple, which ended a contract with Google and launched a self-built mapping platform using TomTom and OpenStreetMap data. In 2012, the launch of pricing for Google Maps led several prominent websites to switch from their service to OpenStreetMap and other competitors. In November 2010, Bing changed their licence to allow use of their satellite imagery for making maps. In March, two founders announced that they have received venture capital funding of €2.4 million for CloudMade, a commercial company that uses OpenStreetMap data.
Ways to import and export data have continued to grow – by 2008, the project developed tools to export OpenStreetMap data to power portable GPS units, replacing their existing proprietary and out-of-date maps. In December 2007, Oxford University became the first major organisation to use OpenStreetMap data on their main website. In October 2007, OpenStreetMap completed the import of a US Census TIGER road dataset. Sponsors of the event included Google, Yahoo! and Multimap. In April 2007, Automotive Navigation Data (AND) donated a complete road data set for the Netherlands and trunk road data for India and China to the project and by July 2007, when the first OSM international The State of the Map conference was held, there were 9,000 registered users.
In December 2006, Yahoo! confirmed that OpenStreetMap could use its aerial photography as a backdrop for map production.
In April 2006, the OpenStreetMap Foundation was established to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and provide geospatial data for anybody to use and share. The first contribution, made in the British city of London in 2005, was thought to be a road by the Directions Mag. In the UK and elsewhere, government-run and tax-funded projects like the Ordnance Survey created massive datasets but failed to freely and widely distribute them. Steve Coast founded the project in 2004, initially focusing on mapping the United Kingdom. OpenStreetMap data has been favourably compared with proprietary datasources, although as of 2009 data quality varied across the world. Many users of GPS devices use OSM data to replace the built-in map data on their devices. Prominent users include Facebook, Wikimedia Maps, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon Logistics, Uber, Craigslist, Snapchat, OsmAnd,, MapQuest Open, JMP statistical software, and Foursquare. The data from OSM can be used in various ways including production of paper maps and electronic maps, geocoding of address and place names, and route planning. The site is supported by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, a non-profit organisation registered in England and Wales. This crowdsourced data is then made available under the Open Database License.
Users may collect data using manual survey, GPS devices, aerial photography, and other free sources, or use their own local knowledge of the area. Since then, it has grown to over two million registered users. Ĭreated by Steve Coast in the UK in 2004, it was inspired by the success of Wikipedia and the predominance of proprietary map data in the UK and elsewhere.
The creation and growth of OSM has been motivated by restrictions on use or availability of map data across much of the world, and the advent of inexpensive portable satellite navigation devices. The geodata underlying the maps is considered the primary output of the project. OpenStreetMap ( OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable geographic database of the world.