Comments on: 2015 Today – My AGI Foresight Study

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 20 May 2010 16:08:28 +0000

We are approaching a cross roads, and some government agencies are putting serious thought into investing their time and effort into OSM…

By: Niels Chr. Nielsen

Niels Chr. Nielsen — Thu, 20 May 2010 11:37:30 +0000

Great post, and probably very corrects predictions about the role af OSM (which could, in a broader sense also stand for Open Source Mapping). Maybe you could be interested in having a look at our presentation from the ENTER eTourism conference i Lugano, in particular if you’d like to discuss applications in tourism and innovations in tourist information/informatics: http://www.scribd.com/doc/31662326/ENTER-2010-Liburd-Nielsen-Sustainable-Experience
Any comments here or directly to the authors very welcome

By: Stu Mitchell

Stu Mitchell — Tue, 18 May 2010 14:57:09 +0000

I was formerly thinking that, in the UK, the data.gov initiative would have nullified the point of OSM. But it doesn’t. It works complementary to it. I think we will see the near completion of OSM in the countries that were first to embrace it, followed by others, notably those where there is poor to little mapping, as we have seen in Haiti. What will happen in countries like the UK and Germany is – following the Wikipedia model – it becomes ‘complete but tweaked’, where users continue to make fine adjustments to make it ‘humanly perfect’.

But that’s the beauty of it – as it grows toward the 1 million user mark, those 1 million users will take pride in moving their local road one metre to the south, to make it near-perfect. That’s the human, grafting quality of it that wasn’t available before now.

By: Harry Wood

Harry Wood — Tue, 18 May 2010 14:42:02 +0000

By 2015 “Professional GIS” and “neogeo” will have finished colliding, and a new tranquil island of geo will have formed. Governments and GIS professionals will still pay for some datasets, but will better understand the benefits of open data and OpenStreetMap, and will opt for that in preference. Skills like osmosis planet file manipulation and Mapnik configuration will be sought after “professional” skills, but also these open source tools will become easier to use and more interoperable with old style GIS software, and with the web.

Either that or google will take over everything.