Has OpenStreetMap a role in Digital Earth applications?

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), as a special subset of crowdsourcing, has provoked interest from many scientific disciplines and industry in the past few years. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most famous and well supported example of a VGI project on the Internet today. As a technology, Digital Earth (DE) offers immediate access to enormous quantities of data and information, referenced by locations on the surface of the planet. One of DE’s goals is to make global spatial information ubiquitously available as an essential component of democracy. OSM’s mission is well positioned within this goal where OSM aims to create a freely available editable map database of the world. This paper explores the characteristics of the collaborative, crowd-based, editing of spatial data in OSM and the crowd itself. We provide some conclusions on how OSM can be best integrated into the fabric of DE.