Hi everyone,
this month OpenStreetMap celebrates its 20th birthday!
OpenStreetMap is a unique and wonderful thing; literally millions of people around the world working together towards a shared goal of mapping the world. Congratulations to everyone in the OpenStreetMap community, but first and foremost of course to the millions of mappers.
While we rely on a long list of open geodata sources, the largest (and most active) by far is OpenStreetMap. It is no exaggeeration to say that OpenCage could not exist without OpenStreetMap.
Our relationship with OpenStreetMap goes back a long way
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in 2006 the first ever commercial use of OpenStreetMap data was by Nestoria, the real estate search brand of Lokku, the company I co-founded and which OpenCage would later (in 2015) spin out from.
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In July 2007, the very first State of the Map conference was held in Manchester, England, and Nestoria was a sponsor.
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In 2008, SotM was held in Limerick, Ireland. Nestoria again sponsored, and I spoke about commercial us of OSM data.
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In 2009 at State of the Map in Amsterdam I spoke about “How people search for locations”
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In 2013 or so at Lokku we started a tradition of an annual holiday donation to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team. While we are no longer part of Lokku, it’s a tradition we continue to this day.
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In 2014 it was at State of the Map Europe in Karlsruhe, Germany that we announced the launch of the OpenCage geocoding API.
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In 2015 Lokku was acquired and as part of that transaction OpenCage became an independent company.
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In 2016 - once we found our feet as a company - we became corporate members of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and have been ever since.
Since then we’ve sponsored countless events and OSM-related software projects over the year. We do our best to educate our customers on the benefits of Open Data generally, and OpenStreetMap specifically, and some have become regular OSM contributors, helping improve the map for everyone. On the weekly Geomob podcast we often discuss OpenStreetMap projects (and indeed these days almost all geospatial projects involve OpenStreetMap in some for or other).
We look forward to watching and contributing to many more years of OpenStreetMap’s evolution.
Happy Birthday, and keep mapping, everyone!
One final note: the next London edition of Geomob - taking place on September 18th - will be focused on OpenStreetMap to celebrate the anniversary. All the talks look intereting, but I am especially looking forward to the talk by Muki Hakley about the very earlliest days of OSM.