The age of crowd-sourced or volunteered geographic information is upon us, and the recent response to Haiti’s disaster mapping needs has thrust this realization forward. An important Blog post from Sean Wohltman of Google makes an excellent point about the existing split between those creating data in Open Street Map and those that are using Google Map Maker. Not surprisingly, the two data sets don’t match, and the question becomes what data is correct and how can the data be conflated to create a unified and accurate map.

As a response, Sean Gorman points to issues of the license that need to be resolved. His point is that a creative commons zero license would be the best way to resolve this issue. I can recall Michael Jones of Google addressing the GeoWeb crowd a few years ago, indicating that discussions had been ongoing with OSM, but that the licensing issue was the stickler.

It seems to me that the disaster context is the most critical aspect of this debate right now. This could be an exercise for the two technical teams of both platforms to conflate and repost at specified intervals. In the long term, a common platform for disaster mapping would be great, perhaps even with dedicated teams that are doing spatial analysis to assist the specific missions of various NGOs.

For the wider geospatial community, this problem provides an excellent opportunity for some education about accuracy issues, and the best practices for data collection. The wiki approach of increasingly better data over time works well in most mapping contexts, but there’s an added importance on accuracy when lives are at stake.

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