OpenCage Data at State of the Map Asia!
We got an opportunity to catch up with Ed Freyfogle the co-founder of OpenCage Data who are one of the sponsors of the conference.
OpenCage started in 2013 as a project within Lokku, a London based company with a long history of using and supporting OpenStreetMap.
Your OSM ID, how long have you been a part of the OSM community?
My OSM id is freyfogle, and I’ve been an on and off OSM contributor for about 12 years. I was living in London when OSM was started. I was working on a start-up, a real-estate search engine that would heavily rely on maps, so was learning a lot about online mapping.
I thought the kind of people who were interested in OSM would also be good potential team members for my start-up so I started going to some of the meet-ups. Actually my company was one of the handful of sponsors of the very first State of the Map conference in Manchester. Anyway, I went to a few mapping parties and helped map a bit of London, but I was never that much of a mapper. I was always very interested in how the growing OSM database might be used, and in 2007 or so I think we were the first ever commercial use of OSM when we started using OSM tiles when someone searched for property in the Isle of Wight, a tiny part of England. Looking back it all feels pretty primitive.
Fast forward to the modern day and I’m one of the makers of the OpenCage Geocoder. We provide a geocoding API based on various open data sources, OpenStreetMap being the largest by far.
Are you visiting India for the first time? What are you most looking forward to while in Bangalore?
It has been my pleasure to visit India twice before, once as a tourist, once for work, including to Bangalore. But it’s been a while, my last visit was in 2014. And those visits were unfortunately very brief. I’m very much looking forward to returning. It’s an exciting place for Europeans to visit because it is very different than what we are used to. Near the top of my list has to be the food.
What do you hope to learn at the conference?
I’ve attended several different OSM and geo conferences here in Europe, so what I’m really looking for is to make more contacts in the various Asian OSM communities. Just trying to learn what their experience is, what is working well, what isn’t. It is, unfortunately, not a part of the world I know well, so I am sure I will learn a lot.
Are you looking forward to any topics of interest, in particular?
In some ways I have found the most recent European conferences a bit too technical. I mean of course the community and companies are always creating more and more interesting tools and that is great, but I most enjoy learning about the local communities and the differences between the countries. As OpenStreetMap is literally mapping the whole world, we have to deal with the diversity of the world. Solutions that are great in one society might not be the right answer in another. That diversity is really interesting to me.
What type of participants do you hope to find at the conference?
Of course I am hoping to make our geocoding service more well known and get feedback on how we can do better in Asia. Since we offer an API our “users” are software developers, so it is always useful to get feedback from anyone who is using our API or geocoding services in general and learn how we can improve. But beyond that I’d just like to learn how data is being collected in Asia, what is working to grow the community, what are innovative ideas that could be applicable to other regions.
What is the most exciting thing about OSM in Asia?
Well it’s not unique to Asia, but what I still find most powerful about OSM in general is that all of us across the world are contributing to a single database that we can then all use. That core idea was amazing in 2006 when I started, but it’s equally powerful now. It’s fascinating to see how it has evolved, how new tools have come along, new technologies, etc, and slowly but surely new communities all around the world have taken up this idea and joined the effort, each putting their local touch on it. But really the core idea itself is the exciting thing.
We are looking forward to Ed and team here at the State of the Map Asia Conference this year! The best way to stay up to date on what they’re up to is by following them on twitter or by reading their blog.
Also, the last date to propose a talk/session at the State of the Map Asia conference is 10th of June midnight UTC. If you are interested in supporting the scholars or sponsoring the conference, find more about it here.
