Charting the eye of the storm

With the horn of Africa spewing hurricanes at us like fireballs lately, I've been paying more attention to hurricane tracking websites. For pure visual quality, information, and ease of use, this website is excellent. Another quality mash-up.

Ibiseye.com

Open Source GoogleMaps

I am always on the lookout for cool maps and mash-ups, and recently came across this website called OpenStreetMap.org. This website is basically like GoogleMaps or YahooMaps, except is created completely from scratch by GPS-toting people all over the world (primarily England, right now). Open Street Map (OSM) is licensed under Creative Commons, meaning basically you can do anything you want to with this technology and there are no restrictions on its use or royalties that have to be paid.

With commercial providers (such as Google, which utilizes TeleAtlas and NavTEQ), anything that you mash-up with their products, they retain the final say and control over its uses. For most public websites this is fine, although it potentially limits some really unique uses of geospatial data. It also limits mixing and matching of "proprietary" data which could best suit the needs of various GIS-enabled projects. Without going into that too much, I am inspired to contribute to the OpenStreetMap project. Now all I need is one of these, or one of these, or eventually this.