Mapping Hacks

The GeoNames blog carries news of improved commercial service with performance guarantees. The flipside, of course, is a limit on requests that can be made to their free services.

The limit is set high enough that it should only affect those making heavy use of the GeoNames web services. They’ve come up with an interesting credit system to price and meter usage. Requests that are “cheap” in terms of the processing load on their systems cost a credit or less. More “expensive” requests such as reverse geocoding, the contents of a spatial envelope, or annotating RSS feeds with GeoRSS information, cost 4 of these credits. As an anonymous user, you get 50,000 credits per IP address per day, which will take some using up. Otherwise a pay-as-U-process scheme along a faintly GRID-like lines.

It’s high time GeoNames got an income from the service that it provides. Web-based applications like the happening Dopplr build up using the components that GeoNames, Flickr et al provide on a free basis, creating positive feedback. There’s your “rising tide that raises all boats”, but longer-term we can’t rely on very large companies to support the components as loss-leader. Instead smaller companies can trickle income through to each other, and I’m glad there’s a place for GeoNames in that picture.

The data underlying GeoNames is still available on a free-to-reuse basis with a CC-BY license - on sale are the smarts and the quality of service. A culture of open data serves to create business, not to undermine it. The GeoNames team haven’t gone all the way, as geocoder.us did, and released the full set of software components as open source, along with the data. That didn’t hurt the sale of commercial services, may even have helped promote them. But is open source essential to an open service? No-one knows yet, but GeoNames seem to be doing a decent job of walking the line.

Posted in geodata, services/geocoder |

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