OT how to get free data

[niklas woermann]

Hi!

I dont know about you, but one thing that really annoys me is the fact that
all
good datasets down to street level are extremely expensive. I think the
situation in the us
is somewhat better than what it is here in europe.

For some reason you can buy  "route 66" with streetmap  data down to streetn
adress level of europe for about 40 euro at your nearest gas station. if you
want access to the same data in a server environment the costs are
ridiculous. 100 000 euro probably.

i think it would be feasible to set up some kind of collaborative web based
effort to gather data and put it into the public domain. this offcourse is
not an easy task, but certainly doable.
i stumbled onto http://www.openstreetmap.org/, which seems like an effort in
this direction.

anyone care to comment?

regards

niklas woermann