HI all
I just stubeled uppon an annoucement [1] that TomTom (make of GPS navigation devices) will launch an OSS project for location aware services/data, called OpenLR [2].
They call it a "universal location referencing technology" and call it "map-agnostic". Not quite sure what's behind it - a collection of data layer? an protocol for supplying and polling such data?
I didn't dig deep, just though it might interest you...
-- daniel
[1] http://ostatic.com/blog/tomtom-launches-open-source-navigation-project [2] http://www.tomtom.com/page/openLR
Daniel Kinzler wrote:
They call it a "universal location referencing technology" and call it "map-agnostic". Not quite sure what's behind it - a collection of data layer? an protocol for supplying and polling such data?
I didn't dig deep, just though it might interest you...
Quote: "TomTom has filed patent applications for the core concept of OpenLR(TM)" :-)
I think they probably realized that nobody is able to provide better local information than people around world. If you are currently stuck in traffic, or got caught by the traffic police, or there is a local market in the town blocking the streets - it takes some time before this information is centrally processed and distributed for example via TMC.
I like using TMC (whenever I drive a car that is equipped *and* this is in Germany) but I like citizen's band radio while on the road even better (works very good for example in Poland). Yes, your range is limited, and the information may be unreliable, and it's good to know local language, but you have multiple sources of information and the decision is ultimately yours. And no navigation system will tell you where the best food is on the road.
Probably TomTom sees it as a valuable addition to the closed navigation maps used in the navigation devices.
I wonder how fast everybody will realize that even with maps local information cannot be substituted. For example, 200meters from where I live Deutsche Bahn has completed construction of a whole new building and a street leading to it, I wonder how fast it will be available on commercial maps. I think that while initial mapping (from nothing) and importing freely licensed data is a problem, the OSM will be unbeatable when it comes to incremental, small updates, just as Wikipedia is.
2009/9/11 Marcin Cieslak saper@saper.info:
I wonder how fast everybody will realize that even with maps local information cannot be substituted. For example, 200meters from where I live Deutsche Bahn has completed construction of a whole new building and a street leading to it, I wonder how fast it will be available on commercial maps. I think that while initial mapping (from nothing) and importing freely licensed data is a problem, the OSM will be unbeatable when it comes to incremental, small updates, just as Wikipedia is.
It'll happen. But whether it'll happen in a completely free manner under the umbrella of projects like OpenStreetMap or whether companies like Google and TomTom can manage the same thing under their proprietary "give us all your data and only get it back in a form that we allow"-term remains to be seen.
Companies like Google are at an advantage because they can throw tons of money at the problem and they have existing well-known applications that people will sign up to. It takes a lot more work to trace a city from GPS traces than from high-resolution aerial imagery that someone allows you to use as long as you map only for them. And if you just care about getting maps on your TomTom or your locked-down you're going to have to deal with whatever mapping company that keeps an iron grip on those devices.