CommonMap

To host a digital collection of locations, free to contribute and consume by anyone for anything.

Welcome to the CommonMap initiative.

This initiative was established because we want to host a digital collection of locations, free to contribute and consume by anyone for anything. There is a demand for a common source of geodata that can be used in the broadest possible ways.

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Drupal Administration: Creative Commons

Why CommonMap?

There may be a few free-to-view mapping services on the internet today, but difficulties currently exist because:

• Commercial operators, such as Google and Navteq, may accept your community edits, but these are captured by that particular commercial operator and cannot be propagated elsewhere.
• Governments are expected to coordinate responses to emergencies, but have difficulty in tracking every named location in their jurisdiction. Being able to get its community involved is useful. It will improve the ability to get there first time.
• Many organisations are duplicating the mapping of the Earth, partly for competitive reasons, but also partly because of licencing mismatches. This is redundant and wastes resources like vehicle fuel.
• Other data sources you may think of as being free and open are moving to disallow mashups with proprietary data sources, or have proprietary licences.

For CommonMap, anyone can contribute, providing they consent to the broad use of their works through the Creative Commons - Attribution licence. In many other respects, the operation of CommonMap is intended to be similar to that of OpenStreetMap, whom we acknowledge as inspiration. Therefore, CommonMap hopes to address the above difficulties, allowing for the first time:

• You can contribute to CommonMap once, and then anybody (including commercial operators) can pick up that edit to improve their base map. This means, when you improve the geodata of your favourite mapping tool, users of other mapping tools can benefit too.
• Governments to accept community edits without having to track the usage of the contributed data. Having a broad usage licence improves government's ability to accept edits, otherwise, government would be trading a location awareness problem for a licencing complexity problem.
• Since CommonMap data can be consumed for anything, improvements in the location data have broad benefits. Commercial operators can literally avoid having to go over the same ground, doing their bit to reduce CO2 emissions. This allows them to compete in value-added services instead.
• The broad usage terms in a Creative Commons - Attribution licence allows anyone to do almost anything with the contributed data. A CC licence is also relatively well known, therefore easier to understand and accept. This reduces friction and uncertainty in the free use of location data.