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Geoinformatics_05-2009
article rethinking the geo-information economy with neogeography donate your geo-data! all of austria on openstreetmap . this was breaking news in january 2009 when it became public knowledge that the viennese publishing house compass.at would provide geo data from its portal plan.at to openstreetmap (osm), which covers all of austria. florian fischer met with hermann futter, the ceo of compass.at, in vienna to get the whole story. by florian fischer he publishing house compass.at is providing data from its website plan.at for importation to openstreetmap. the announcement in january 2009 was brief and did not get the broad media attention that was expected, even though this step by compass.at might be the first sign of a change in the austrian geo-information market. since then the community has been working on the integration of the geo data. t geo-data provider overnight compass has been publishing business information for more than 140 years. they were among the first 500 companies worldwide that ran their own web servers to publish their data. in 1997 they started a service called plan.at which, as futter says, became the new economy hangout . all business data from compass was mapped on plan.at using geographic data from one of the numerous private sector geo data providers of the time. before the duopoly of navteq and teleatlas emerged, there were some other geo data companies as well, explains futter. to shorten the story a bit, plan.at reached the break-even point just before the crash of the new economy, their geo data provider went bankrupt, and compass bought all the data and became a geo data provider overnight. it was mainly basic geo data, futter says, and we continued to work on the data to maintain and extend it . becoming a private sector mapping agency overnight, they were somewhat free from the mental constraints of those who were deep in the business of private and public mapping agencies, and they had a vision. at that time we had the idea to launch a geo data community together with other surveying companies to collaboratively stream our data to a common pool. our aim then was to be independent from the big players, at least concerning the coverage of austria . compass encountered problems similar to those of the predecessor of wikipedia. their requirements for the validity of the data were simply too high and too strong. "the idea of osm has been much more elaborated than ours," futter admits, "but when we saw what osm is, it was clear for us to contribute our geo data". compass.at will sooner or later make a total change from using their own geo-data to the usage of osm data for their product plan.at. july/august 2009 hermann futter, ceo of the publishing house compass.at in vienna 12
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