roomthily

Warm vs. Cold Geography

(above: green lines in Des Moines marking OSM contributors’ reviews of TIGER data (left); red lines in Omaha marking original TIGER data untouched by OSM contributors (right))

OpenStreetMap needs those flesh and blood contributors, because it is ‘Warm Geography’ at its core: real people mapping what is important to them — as opposed to the ‘Cold Geography’ of the thematic geodata churned out by the national mapping agencies and commercial street data providers; data that is governed by volumes of specifications and elaborate QA rules.

via oegeo