Open Street Map Makes a Commercial Deal

Open Street Map (OSM), the open data, community mapping project, has just made its first commercial deal. Nestoria, a UK realty company, is now providing the option to use OSM's data for the Isle of Wight. They use Google exclusively for the rest of the world. The Nestoria map below shows the OSM integration:

This is an impressive step for the mapping service. The Isle of Wight data was collected by volunteers armed with GPS units over a weekend. They collected GPS traces and then used the OSM tools to make a map good enough for commercial use. I think that this is only the beginning, I bet they get another commercial deal by the end of the year.

In other OSM news, it has now been added as one of the options in Mapstraction, a JavaScript library used to abstract the various mapping APIs. With this addition, you can now easily switch between 4 different providers: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and OSM.