Michal Migurski on the difficulties of using OpenStreetMap data:
Two weeks ago, I attended the 5th annual OpenStreetMap conference in Denver, State of the Map. My second talk was called Piecemeal Geodata, and I hoped to communicate some of the pain (and opportunity) in dealing with OpenStreetMap data as a consumer of the information, downstream from the mappers but hoping to make maps or work with the dataset. Harry Wood took notes that suggested I didn’t entirely miss the mark, but after I was done Tom MacWright congratulated me on my “excellent stealth rage talk”. It wasn’t really supposed to be ragey as such, so here are some of my slides and notes along with some followup to the problems I talked about.
Topic maps are in use in a number of commercial and governmental venues but aren’t the sort of thing you hear about like Twitter or Blackberries (mostly about outages).
Anticipating more civil disturbances over the next several years, do topic maps have something to offer when coupled with a technology like Google Maps or OSM?
It is one thing to indicate your location using an app, but can you report movement of forces in a way that updates the maps of some colleagues? In a secure manner?
What features would a topic map need for such an environment?