OS "Google Map"?

[+macroderma]

http://news.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029694,49284897,00.htm

 

An opportunity for geocaching.com?

[+The Forester]

An opportunity for GC.com to spend shedloads of money, certainly.

 

The OS currently charges up to £5M to commercial users for its full dataset of large scale mapping for the whole of Britain.

 

I doubt whether GC.com would want to spend that much for just one country.

 

The OS is obviously using the old bait&switch trick to lure people into doing its own market development legwork for it.

[+lordelph]

OpenSpace is really designed to foster bedroom innovators in the same way Google Maps has. Ed Parsons, the CTO of Ordnance Survey, is pretty forward thinking, but his bottom line is that "someone has to pay"

 

A commercial entity like gc.com would have to pay. Last time I looked, 1:50K raster maps for Great Britain cost around £110,000 for a website licence. I don't yet know what the commercial model for OpenSpace will be, or even if there is one, but I would imagine something similiar but with various levels of fees to help new enterprises using OS data to get started.

 

That said, it probably won't stop someone from making a Firefox GreaseMonkey script to integrate OpenSpace into gc.com though

 

I can't wait to see OpenSpace, it's a positive move for the OS and it'll be fun to see what's possible!

 

(Disclaimer: OS sponsor www.geograph.org.uk and recently donated the 1:50K raster maps to the project)