[Freegis-list] freemap project in Oslo, Norway.

[Jonny Birkelund]

hi,

Just to inform you, There is a project currently running here in Oslo
Norway to break the map monopoly. What we do is: 

- manually walking/driving around here in Oslo and track every street
  with a gps. We dump this data into grass and build a vector-based
  map from there. There is also a project to automatically doing this,
  so everything a user would do is to send the trk-log to an email
  adress, and then it will show up on web with a ranking list of
  people involved, with distance logged.

The web adress is www.freemap.net.org (sorry nothing in english yet,
but it will come pretty soon)

But in short, there is just some politicially bullshit about why there
should be free vectormaps and how they would get more votes if they
gave this information away.. I would not hold my breath though, but it
is a good start.

We did something similar with the norwegian laws, scanning all the
constitution and laws (some 3300 pages of small text with bibel-like
papers) and pushed the cause hard. After a while we actually managed
to get free electronic laws. (www.lovdata.no) Not bad from a bunch of
poor students.
 
/Jonny