Nestoria is one of those companies that was told it would have to start paying real money for Google Maps. When Google couldn’t tell it exactly how much, Nestoria kicked Mountain View to the curb and switched to OpenStreetMap, a free, collaborative effort to map the globe.

But that’s only part of the story. Nestoria’s “free and open” map data is actually served up by MapQuest, the once and future mapping outfit that ruled the web before Google Maps stole its thunder. At Nestoria — a popular UK-based real estate website — the online mapping game has come full circle.

OpenStreetMap, or OSM, is yet another example of a project that manages to compete with a massive tech company simply by crowdsourcing a problem. Much like Wikipedia challenged Encyclopedia Britannica and Linux took on Microsoft Windows, OpenStreetMap is battling Google Maps, and at least in some cases, it’s winning.

OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast says the project is “still waiting for the big one.” But in addition to Nestoria and so many other small outfits making the leap to OSM, some bigger organizations have taken note. The White House employed OSM to track its Change campaign, and in 2008, the popular photo-sharing site Flickr adopted the project.

And like many an open source project, OSM has been commandeered by companies looking to catch up with the market behemoth. MapQuest isn’t the only one backing the project. So too is Microsoft.

Where The Streets Have a Name

By day, Steve Coast is one of the lead architects on the mobile version of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. By night, he founded and still chairs OpenStreetMap, a UK-based non-profit that runs on an annual budget of less than $100,000. As it happens, OSM receives hardware donations from Coast’s daytime employer.

Coast started the “free and open” project seven years ago. He was looking for an alternative to the maps offered by the British government and large companies such as NavTeq. The big aggregators housed almost all of the good map data, he says, and they knew how to render it, using “tiles” so you could move around a map without having to reload the entire page. And because of this, they could charge an “astronomical amount” for their maps.

OSM was designed to reduce map licencing fees to zero — a concept that Coast gives credit to Google for landing on first — but it was also meant to improve the accuracy of maps. The project was seeded with satellite imagery, and then the world-at-large was invited to put labels and borders on the images, otherwise known as “volunteered geographical information,” or VGI.

Soon, volunteers were using GPS units attached to bicycles and car to improve the VGI. Towns and cities began as islands of data, but eventually, the catalog of data spread to the far corners of the globe. Today, the project houses about 19 GB of compressed XML data, and when expanded, it reaches into the terabyte range. Google was actually an early contributor, and both Microsoft and MapQuest are now providing data. Many assume that MapQuest is dead, but it was bought by AOL and relaunched in July 2010 as “the first major mapping site to embrace and encourage open source mapping at scale.”

According to Pat McDevitt, the vice president of engineering at MapQuest, the company still gets about 40 million unique visitors each month to its site, and it has invested about a million dollars in OSM in an effort to undercut the map licensing fees levied by NavTeq and Tele Atlas (owned by TomTom). “The hyperlocal detail that a motivated community adds is way beyond a commercial provider,” McDevitt tells Wired.

A 2009 paper from University College London said that on average, OSM’s VGI is within six meters or a street or landmark’s actual position. Two years later, a second paper, from the University of Heidelberg and the University of Florida, found that OSM provides 27 percent more data in Germany with regard to the total street network and route information for pedestrians than TomTom’s commercial dataset.

“We went through a bubble period where we were [just] this free and open alternative — but not nearly as good [as competitors],” Coast says. “But with companies like Microsoft and MapQuest contributing now, it’s way more sustainable than it was four years ago.”

GreenInfo Network — a non-profit outfit that builds maps for (often cash-strapped) public services and environmental groups — started using OSM base maps in 2009 because it provided information the organization couldn’t find anywhere else. OSM’s data is not confined to streets. GreenInfo pulled data on park trails for its ParkInfo application.

“For our purposes, base map tiles available from OSM easily rival, and oftentimes surpass, commercial offerings,” Tim Sinnott, a GIS specialist at GreenInfo, tells Wired. “And if we find holes or errors in the data, we can edit information along with the rest of the world.”

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