OpenStreetMap Should Be a Priority for the Open Source Community

Glyn Moody — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 11:30:00 +0000

Why open source needs an open geographic dataset.

Open source has won. The fact that free software now dominates practically every sector of computing (with the main exception of the desktop) is proof of that. But there is something even more important than the victory of open source itself, and that is the wider success of the underlying approach it embodies. People often forget just how radical the idea of open, collaborative development seemed when it appeared in the 1990s. Although it is true that this philosophy was the norm in the very earliest days of the field, that culture was soon forgotten with the rapid rise of commercial computing, which swept everything before it in the pursuit of handsome profits. There, a premium was placed on maintaining trade secrets and of excluding competitors. But the appearance of GNU and Linux, along with the other open software projects that followed, provided repeated proof that the older approach was better for reasons that are obvious upon reflection.

Open, collaborative development allows people to build on the work of others, instead of wastefully re-inventing the wheel, and it enables the best solutions to be chosen on technical, rather than commercial, grounds. The ability to work on areas of personal interest, rather than on those assigned by managers, encourages new talent to join projects in order to pursue their passions, while the non-discriminatory global reach of the open method means that the pool of contributors is much larger than for conventional approaches. However, none of those advantages is tied to software: they can be applied to many fields. And that is precisely what has happened in the last two decades, with the ideas underlying free software producing astonishing results elsewhere.

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Geolocation

Reuven Lerner — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 16:00:00 +0000

by Reuven Lerner

There's an old saying in the real-estate business that the three most important things in a property are location, location and location. We can assume this is still true when it comes to real estate, but it also is increasingly true when it comes to Web applications. A number of my recent consulting projects have included, in one way or another, the need to work with addresses and locations of various sorts.

This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, given the many ways that the Web is becoming the way we communicate, store information and work. It gives me a warm (if somewhat creepy) feeling when a site I go to wishes me a "good morning", because it knows it is now morning in my part of the world. It's useful when a mapping program starts off by displaying my current location as a default. And as the person running various applications, I like the fact that I can learn basic geographical information about my users—both so I can offer additional services while simultaneously receiving useful data.

Working with street addresses, location coordinates and the like falls under the umbrella of "geolocation". So in this article, I review a few of the technologies and options that use geolocation and offer some suggestions as to how you can include such features in your own Web applications.

Which Server?

The first thing to realize when it comes to geolocation is that you're almost certainly not going to be able to do it alone. Sure, given enormous amounts of time and money, you probably could figure out the locations and street addresses of most people in the world, but you're unlikely to do this. This means you're going to have to connect to one or more companies that owns and distributes mapping information via an API, such as Google, Bing (Microsoft) or similar.

There are free and open-source alternatives to commercial map providers, such as http://freegeoip.net and http://www.openstreetmap.org. However, the APIs of the commercial offerings are richer and seem to be better supported. Even some of the free services will require or expect that you have an API key, for which you need to register. This allows them to track how many requests you are making and to limit your usage unless you pay for a commercial tier. Although it is useful and nice to work with open-source tools, the remainder of this column assumes you are working with a commercial provider.

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