On 10/17/06, Dschwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
The point is: suppose someone wanted to buy $100,000,000 of existing copyrighted material and set it free. What should it be?
Geographical data!
Right now there os only a very limited amount of free geodata available. The US is a positive example, but in Europe most of the data to generate useful maps is copyrighted and sold to companies like TeleAtlas.
There is far more free geographical data in existence than you might guess.
For example, in the US most local municipalities create their own coverages including high resolution orthophotography (or rather, contract for the creation of them)... In most cases the data is available for free or at a low cost, but you have to know who to ask.
The huge problem after that is the data isn't uniform.. it's not all in the same datum, nor is necessarily documented what datum its in!
The fact that there is lots of cleanup work needed isn't bad news for us: we're good at that. The fact that the cleanup requires specialized knowledge isn't good, because we've not proven ourselves good at that sort of work.
There is also the little question of software... We don't have anything for displaying this sort of data ourselves ... and version controlled collaborative editing of geodata beyond single points is an unsolved problem.
If we were going to set a budget ... I'd say for geodata we would budget for: 1) Creation of map display software like Wikimapia which pulls point data from Wikipedia. 2) Obtaining cover data (country/state outlines) and orthophotography to use as a basemap for above.
And then focus on adding good point data to our articles, vs building a comprehensive geoinformation system. I'd invision the cover data money being spent more to pay someone to track down geodata from free sources rather than buy them commercially (by all means, if we are able.. But I don't think anyone in that business will sell us their data just so we can turn around and give it away).