At this point, you may be wondering, what about the maps? So far, we have not included any geospatial data or visualization. We will be offloading some of the effort in managing and providing geospatial data and services to OpenStreetMap—our favorite public open source geospatial data repository!
Note
Why do we use OpenStreetMap?
OSM already provides mirrored map services for quick reproduction in the basemaps
OSM provides a very extensive and scalable schema for the kind of geographic features that you might find on a campus
Various web, mobile, and desktop clients have already been written to interact with the OSM API
OSM provides the databases and other infrastructure, so we don't have to
OSM has a granular and reliable way to track changes, using the
osm_versionandosm_userfields, which complement theosm_idunique ID field