CloudMade last made an appearance on ZDNetUK as part of an OpenStreetMap themed blog back in February of this year when the company’s involvement with the free and editable map of the world project was starting to gain pace. It was at this time that the London, Kiev and Silicon Valley based vendor first started to be recognised as a provider of a commercial-grade platform for developers interested in mapping applications.
Today, CloudMade is talking about the recent Beta launch of it Mapzen web-based map editing tool and the POI Collector iPhone application, which it claims will reduce the complexity of editing and adding Points of Interest (POIs) to OpenStreetMap.
CloudMade describes OpenStreetMap.org as a Wikipedia-style map of the world and says that it has over 190,000 users worldwide. The company further states that this is increasing at a rate of 300+ people every day and that the learning curve for newcomers wanting to edit or add to OpenStreetMap is improving.
“As mapping moves more mainstream, with everyone from cyclists, hikers, skiers, rafters and runners wanting to get involved, the need for more user friendly map creation tools increases,” said Nick Black, co-founder of CloudMade. “These applications have been built based on feedback from existing editors of the OpenStreetMap community.”
According to CloudMade, the Mapzen POI Collector iPhone application provides the first on-the-go mapping tool of its kind. Up until now, to mark a POI on OpenStreeMap, users had to record them via a GPS device and then connect that GPS device to a PC; or mark the POIs on a conventional paper map and manually input them via a PC to OpenStreetMap.org.
CloudMade states that, “Mapping with Mapzen contributes directly to OpenStreetMap which can be freely distributed, shared and published under the Creative-Commons Attribution–Share Alike license.”
The company’s Navi Studio tools for developers can be found here and in general there appears to be lots of positive energy behind this project. Let’s hope the commercial side of what CloudMade does continues to have a positive input to the open source end of this equation.
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