Monday, August 10. 2009

Whose maps serve India the best?

Ajay Shah asks that question in an article in the Financial Express. Here's that state of things and a suggestion on how to proceed:

Thus, three strategies are now in play in India: a high quality solution which is a public goods effort (Openstreetmap), a good solution which is owned by a corporation (Google) and a poor solution which acts like a corporation (Survey of India). The users of maps are flocking to Google, Nokia and Openstreetmap.

From the viewpoint of the government, the first best strategy is to shift Survey of India into the mode of uncompromisingly releasing maps data in the public domain, matching the release strategy of the US government on openness.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 08:46 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

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Very true. Survey of India inherits the way of working from its colonial past. See how the Ordinance Survey in the UK is struggling to open up its data. I don't see Survey of India every opening it's data to the public. My money is on efforts like OpenStreetMap which is catching up fast in India...

#1 Just Another Techie (Link) on 2009-08-11 06:42 (Reply)

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