A Comparative Study of Proprietary Geodata and Volunteered Geographic Information for Germany

TLDR: The strong demand for freely available spatial data, though, has boosted the number of VGI available on the Internet and one of the most complex and promising projects in recent years is OpenStreetMap (OSM).

Abstract: In connection with the Web 2.0 movement of the Internet (O’Reilly, 2005) and the progressive development of tools and applications for the collection and provision of spatial information (Turner, 2006), the quality and quantity of so-called Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) (Goodchild, 2007) underwent a fast-paced worldwide development. Some even speak of a “Wikification of GIS” (Sui, 2008). This spatial data, mostly collected by volunteers, is freely available for the Internet user and can (under certain licensing conditions) be applied to numerous GIS projects and applications. Through advanced data donations, but also by a variety of other non-proprietary data sources, some of these free data providers are able to offer a vast variety of different information. This development in recent years stands in strong contrast to the very expensive commercial spatial data provided by a few companies. Much of this proprietary data is widely used today, for example, in car navigation devices or cell phones. The strong demand for freely available spatial data, though, has boosted the number of VGI available on the Internet. They can be found in very simple forms such as in Wikipedia entries that provide some spatial information like lat-long coordinates (geotag), or in so-called mashups in Google Earth or Google Maps, which combine different information sources. One of the most complex and promising projects in recent years, however, is OpenStreetMap (OSM).