Before and After Shots of Google's Iran Maps

There many places in the world where it is not possible for larger companies to map them. These can be for economic reasons as is the case for Black Rock City (the temporary 40,000 person home for Burning Man). Or for political reasons as is the case for Iran and countries such as China.
As I mentioned the other day Google greatly improved their map coverage of Iran via user contributions through their Mapmaker program. These user contributions were applied just a few weeks ago. Here are before and after screenshots of two Iranian cities. The before shot was taken on September 22, 2008; the after shots were taken on May 18, 2009.

Mashhad (Before and After)

Tabriz (Before and After)

GeoData Explorations: Open Street Map's Growth

Open Street Map (OSM), the open data mapping project, has grown a lot over the past year. It now has almost 80,000 users and 800 million data points.

OSM's data is still freely available, but commercial services around it have sprung up. Cloudmade is a startup that recently moved from the UK to San Francisco to be closer to investors and try to build up their US data. GeoFabrik is a German startup with similar plans (just focused on Germany). Flickr has been making use of it lately to supplement Yahoo's Mapping data (specifically Black Rock City, Beijing, Kabul and Baghdad).

The above image is Planet - A Year Of Edits On OpenStreetMap. It was generated on November 23rd, 2008 by Peter Ito. Most of the growth occurred in Europe (where the project originated) and the United States (where the founder has moved). The US community has really picked up the pace and has started replacing the US government's free TIGER data set. You can see images of the data edits in the US for October and November and an animation of the world's edits.

This cartogram shows the distribution of POIs (Points of Interest) in the OSM data set. The UK and Germany have a disproportionate amount of data compared to their land mass (but obviously not compared to their OSM users). This image was released on 11/7 on the Cloudmade blog.

If you're not familiar with cartograms go explore Worldmapper, it's an amazing site filled with them. Or make your own with the same software.

The above graph shows the number of registered (and presumably contributing) OSM users and the number of uploaded track points. The user growth is similar to the early Wikipedia years, but it's uncertain whether OSM will be able to match Wikipedia's amazing growth. Uploading GPS tracks or editing geo data is a higher user barrier than editing an article. The user's have to register and use complicated tools (though Potlatch, the online editor, attempts to even the playing field).

If you want to see the people behind the map all of their names are available in this short animation. You can see other OSM stats in their wiki.

This is the latest GeoData Explorations post, also see GeoData Explorations: Google's Ever-Expanding Geo Investment. If you have geodata to share (for a future post) let me know in the comments.

DisasterTech from Where2.0

I was honored to speak with Mikel Maron at Where2.0 about innovation in Disaster Technology, a topic that is extremely important to me. Here is the video:

This talk covers the ongoing efforts of: World Shelters, the UN Joint Logistics Centre, Humanitarian.info, InSTEDD, and Humanlink.

You can read about the development of SMS GeoChat, the Sahana effort for Burma/Myanmar (Radar post), and the Mesh4x KML sync engine on Eduardo Jezierski's blog and on Jon Thompson's Aid Worker Daily.