Here is a beautiful video made by ItoWorld that shows the progress of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project during 2008. Those who don’t know OSM, should take notice of the exponential growth of this data source. Contrary to NAVTEQ (which provides geospatial data to almost all online services, including Google Maps, Yahoo, MapQuest, and Microsoft Virtual Earth), the content of OSM is free, open source, and largely user-generated.

I think that in the near future, bottom-up projects like this will replace the top-down commercial data sets, similarly to the way that Wikipedia has replaced online reference material. The paradigm has the advantage of numbers, making it more possible to keep up-to-date with the changing global landscape.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo