There’s a lot of hype about OpenStreetMap right now. Could be that once the map is finished and at a level of accuracy comparable to Navteq or Teleatlas, OSM could do to base map providers what Wikipedia did to Encyclopaedia Britannica …

I managed to catch up with OpenStreetMap founder, Steve Coast, earlier this week and asked him how far we were from global OSM coverage.

“Well, what’s global? Right now I can tell you that by end of 2009, our coverage of the US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands will be as good or better than other base map.”

Again, I needed to check: is OSM really free? The online map is actually how it looks, but it’s been simplified as the original base map has more info/layers, which would make it hard to read if all were switched on.

Yes, it’s open source and open access  - if you know what to do with a base map, otherwise you use CloudMade to get a ready-to-use map with your profiling, routing elements and all sorts of options that they have to use make the map as useful as possible. Steve also confirmed that there wasn’t any exclusivity deal between OSM and CloudMade, so, as with Linux, any other company could use CloudMade. (DeCarta won’t be first in line, I guess.)

What OSM really means is that the value is not in the base map anymore but in the layers of services you build on top of it. It means any non-profit organisation can now have access to free maps. It also means the end to the salami sliced licensing rules that each developer has to deal with when building an app for different phones, screen sizes, etc.  This is also why Apple asked the app developer to BYOM (Bring Your Own Map).

So why on earth aren’t all the world’s app developers using OSM already?

Steve suggests two things.

First is completeness. A navigation software developer will need a very solid map that he can rely on. I suppose updates will also need to be guaranteed …

Second is trust. Like Wikipedia, everybody starts by denigrating anything new and user-generated as incomplete, untrustworthy and doomed to failure.

A map is not an encyclopaedia, though. This isn’t a matter of opinion; it’s fact. Steve has had very little to do in terms of proofing / correcting entries. He told me that most of the corrections were based on genuine mistakes made by new people when they were updating the data.

So what’s next in the unstoppable free map route?

More details, says Steve. Imagine we have a map of a zoo, with the suggested directions to get there as well as the labels on each cage telling us where the animals are. I thought it was a good allusion to companies wanting to ensure their location is obvious and updated by labelling their building on the map (like every company’s entry in Wikipedia).

Next will come features and services like cycle routes, more POIs, etc.

Steve will be speaking at the Nav&Loc show in Amsterdam in June as well as in San Jose at the new MetaPlaces show in September

UPDATE: the discussion about OSM is live and very animated on the MetaPlaces LinkedIn group