History
Steve Coast founded the project in 2004, initially focusing on mapping the United Kingdom. In the UK and elsewhere, government-run and tax-funded projects like the Ordinance Survey created massive datasets but failed to freely and widely distribute them. In April 2006, the OpenStreetMap Foundation was established to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and provide geospatial data for anybody to use and share. In December 2006, Yahoo confirmed that OpenStreetMap could use its aerial photography as a backdrop for map production.
In April 2007, Automotive Navigation Data (AND) donated a complete road data set for the Netherlands and trunk road data for India and China to the project and by July 2007, when the first OSM international The State of the Map conference was held, there were 9,000 registered users. Sponsors of the event included Google, Yahoo and Multimap. In October 2007, OpenStreetMap completed the import of a US Census TIGER road dataset. In December 2007, Oxford University became the first major organisation to use OpenStreetMap data on their main website.
Ways to import and export data have continued to grow – by 2008, the project developed tools to export OpenStreetMap data to power portable GPS units, replacing their existing proprietary and out-of-date maps. In February 2008, a series of workshops were held in India. In March, two founders announced that they have received venture capital funding of 2.4M euros for CloudMade, a commercial company that uses OpenStreetMap data.
In 2012, the launch of pricing for Google Maps led several prominent websites to switch from their service to OpenStreetMap and other competitors. Chief amongst these were Foursquare, Craigslist who adopted OpenStreetMap, and Apple, Inc., which ended a contract with Google and launched a self-built mapping platform which uses TomTom and OpenStreetMap data.
Read more about this topic: Open Street Map
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