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Now also using OpenStreetMap

February 18th, 2009 by Alex

Glossary powered by Factolex.com

OpenStreetMap

  • a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world
  • Openstreetmap logo

You have probably seen that we use Google Maps for displaying terms that have a geolocation (such as cities, countries, etc).

There is an open source alternative to Google Maps, called OpenStreetMap where everyone can help updating the map data. The project has gone a long way and already provides pretty solid data. It makes sense to give control to the users over the data. Everyone knows his neighborhood better than some place in another country. And third parties who provide data for Google Maps just don’t live in everyone’s neighborhood.

So it’s like OpenStreetMap is a perfect fit to Factolex. But the interface of Google Maps is pretty much unrivaled in my opinion. So we simply decided to combine the best of both worlds, as it is described in an article in the OpenStreetMap Wiki.

Take the not-so-well known small city of Cham in Germany, and let’s compare Google Maps to OpenStreetMap:

googlemaps vs. openstreetmap

There you go, quite a difference. As indicated on the top right of the screenshots, you can still switch to Google data if you come across an area that is not covered that well in OpenStreetMap.

This entry was posted by Alex on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 4:34 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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