Innovation is our regular column that highlights emerging
technological ideas and where they might lead Crowdsourcing a
map of the world, and letting anybody edit it, might sound
supremely democratic, but until now it has been a largely
exclusive game. Unless you're familiar with cartographic jargon,
you haven't been able to play. That's a pretty big obstacle for
the OpenStreetMap project, which wants to generate a map that no
government agency (such as the British Ordnance Survey) or
commercial entity (Nokia, Tom-Tom, Google and the like) could
claim any rights to. The project kicked off in 2004 and can
boast some 180,000 contributors, who have slowly been building
the map. But that progress could be supercharged by improvements
in cellphone technology and a slew of new apps that can turn
anyone into a cartographer. Power to the people Typically,
OpenStreetMap enthusiasts walk, hike, cycle, drive or even sail
around so-far unmapped locales using handheld satnavs to mark
the coordinates of points of interest,