01.07.2008
Free maps for all!
Fabian Fingerle (l.) and his colleagues on the road with their GPS device. (Copyright: Hanno Böck)
Many cities have already been included in the
OpenStreetMap project. Kaisersbach was still missing, however. That prompted Fabian Fingerle, a student at the
Esslingen University of Applied Sciences, and his friends – fellow information technology students and freelance IT service providers – to hit the road. Equipped with GPS receivers, they set out to map the village in the Stuttgart metropolitan region. The devices accurately record their complete routes, and step by step, a digital record of Kaisersbach takes shape. After their stroll, Fingerle sits down at his computer and enters the data. As soon as he is finished, he will send it to the server of the OpenStreetMap project and a short time later, Kaisersbach will appear on the free maps of OpenStreetMap.
Fingerle and around 30,000 like-minded activists worldwide are mapping the globe on foot with the assistance of GPS positioning satellites. The objective of the OpenStreetMap community is to create a world map that will eclipse anything that has been seen to date. The results will cover a broad range of interests – detailed maps for hikers and cyclists, route planners for the physically handicapped, city guides and maps of ski pistes. And what’s more, they will be available free of charge.
Many areas are uninteresting for commercial map vendors or too difficult or expensive for them to cover. OpenStreetMap gives anyone the option to change that and make their own contribution to the project.
More:
http://www.hs-esslingen.de/http://www.openstreetmap.org/
