Nestoria Interview: David Dean on OpenStreetMap Australia

As well as viewing the Nestoria listings on the GoogleMaps interface you can also look at them on OpenStreetMap, which is all well and good if you live in the UK where there have been big OpenStreetMap meets designed to map whole cities all at once, but how's the lay of the OpenStreetMap land in Australia?  We'd better chat to someone who knows and find out...  That someone being David Dean, Speech, Audio, Image and Video Technologies PhD, and the member of the Brisbane OSM community most likely to be organising the next meet up or party.

First up how did you get into mapping and OpenStreetMap?

I first found out about the project soon after it began through a link on Boing Boing, but then forgot about it for a few years until a geocaching friend mentioned it around 2007. I had a look around Brisbane then and coverage was pretty poor so I got started.

What are the OSM projects you're interested in or engaged with at the
moment?  Or are you just mapping as you go?

I've done a little bit of bug fixing and minor coding for the gosmore navigation project, but for the most part I just get out there and map. I'm generally more interested in walking or riding out in the field to collect street names and other map features that are hard to get from satellite imagery. I'm happy to leave the armchair mapping to others.

What would you say is your mapping 'claim to fame'?

I seem to have become the main organiser of OpenStreetMap community events in Brisbane. We have organised mapping events for more than a year now, and they have been monthly since July 2009, with growing attendances, which is encouraging.

How would you say the Australian OSM community is doing in terms of the rest of the globe?  And are there regions of Australia where you think OSM is better than professional maps?  Where would you place your home town, Brisbane, on regards other capital cities?

I can only really talk from personal experience in Brisbane, but I'm fairly certain that OpenStreetMap has good coverage in most of the larger cities of Australia, but probably nowhere near the detail that OpenStreetMap has in the UK or Europe. Brisbane's coverage is pretty good these days, but I think Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra probably have better coverage at the moment.

And what about in terms of other paid for maps?

In comparison to commercial maps, I would say that wherever someone has done a detailed ground survey they are probably the best maps you can get. I'm particular happy with the use of OpenStreetMap for hiking/cycling trails and paths, because most of the commercial mapping providers are not even interested in collecting this data.

There are a few problems that people always site about open sourced mapping, things like how reliable is volunteered information?  How should data be licensed?  How do you expand the number of users to improve the quality? Do you consider any of these problems to be major challenges in Australia?  And if not what do you personally feel are  the big challenges for OSM Australia?

I think the 'problem' with volunteered information has already proven to be minimal by Wikipedia, which I doubt many internet users can go a week (or even a day) without using to learn something new.

Of course, I think that OpenStreetMap needs an easier way to quickly revert vandalism edits, but I believe there are some technical problems to making this a one-click process like it is for Wikipedia. However, despite the exponential user growth, I don't believe that vandalism is a bug problem at the moment. In Brisbane, I've only had to revert one case of vandalism, and that user gave up relatively quickly.

I don't think OpenStreetMap is having any problems expanding its user base, but I'm sure there are still a large volume of people who would be interested in OpenStreetMap, if only they knew that it existed.

One of the major issue for OpenStreetMap in Australia will be how are we going to go about getting all of the roads. As Australia is a large country with a very low population density there are a lot of roads to map, and it is clearly not something that will be completed if people only map their local area (unless we can convince everyone in Australia to help).

While there are some datasets that we could potentially convince the government to release, it is unclear how reliable this data is, with many rural areas reported as having many incorrect details, particular with gazetted roads that don't actually exist. Some of the commercial mapping providers who care about accuracy pay workers who drive around Australia full-time to collect these details, but it is not clear how OpenStreetMap can collect similar information (and keep it up-to-date) purely through volunteer methods.

What kind of things to you see on the OSM horizon?

I think the best thing to improve OpenStreetMap is to get more people using it. If we can get people using OpenStreetMap maps in their car navigation devices or on their mobile phones they will have the best maps possible in many areas, and when they spot mistakes they can fix them easily, or just pop up a flag to let more dedicated mappers have a look at the problem. However, there still isn't really any software using OpenStreetMaps that approaches the ease of use of modern car navigation software, but I know people are working on it...

You said you'd heard of Nestoria - do you have any advice for us entering the Australian market?  Or any suggestions about how to improve what we've got at the moment?

Make the OpenStreetMaps default instead of Google :) .

I don't have a lot of experience in real estate websites, but it'll be interesting to see how Nestoria manages to crack the near-monopoly that the existing main real estate has in Australia. I've tried using other real estate websites in Brisbane before, but found that there was nowhere near as many places listed as the main real estate website that nearly everyone uses.

Is there anything else you'd like to talk about now you've hopefully got flowing?

If the reader is interested in OpenStreetMap, go and attend a mapping party in your local area (check wiki.osm.org). If your local area doesn't have any mapping parties, start one!

Thanks again for taking the time to share your Aussie take on OpenStreetMap.

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