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The grandaddy of online mapping sites is turning to an open source library for its cartography data.
Mapquest, which is owned by AOL, launched a new beta site Friday that uses data from OpenStreetMap. So far, the OpenStreetMap data is only available on MapQuest for the United Kingdom and some of continental Europe, but MapQuest says it will broaden the scope of this experiment in the future.
Just to show it's not messing around, the company has also established a $1 million fund "to support the growth of open-source mapping in the United States." So, we can expect MapQuest to start hosting U.S. maps from OpenStreetMap at some point.
OpenStreetMap is like a Wikipedia for maps. It's a fully open source and crowdsourced project. All of the geodata in the OSM system is gathered and entered by volunteers, and all of it is freely available for all to use. Furthermore, if you find an inaccuracy in a map anywhere in the world, you can actually go in and fix it. Here's what a year's worth of OSM edits looks like.
There's a wiki with more information if you want to get involved. We've written extensively about the project before – check out some of the links at the bottom of this article.
MapQuest is using OSM for tile images and all cartographic data. It is then applying its own user interface and routing algorithms on top of OpenStreetMaps' maps.
Here's what MapQuest's Antony Pegg has to say about the project on the MapQuest developer blog:
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