Maine-based geo-corp DeLorme announced last week that it would be opening up its worldwide and United States base maps to developers for GIS and OEM applications.
From the press release:
“The DeLorme North America Data Sets provide a routable US highway, street, back road, and trail network. Detail also includes land cover, drainage and open water, plus places of interest. It is compiled from a variety of sources and includes a digital elevation model to provide topographic detail and contours. The data has a positional accuracy of +/- 5 meters CE in areas where the majority of the US population resides. Street-level detail is also available from DeLorme for Canada and Mexico.
DeLorme World Base Map data provides a seamless 1:250,000 view of the earth, combining accurate object placement and projection with a unique topographic visualization, complete with a digital elevation model for the entire earth. This data set offers a consistent level of detail and reliable horizontal accuracy of +/- 50 meters for all features worldwide, unlike previous public domain data sets. A comparison of the DeLorme dataset to competitors’ digital map data of developing regions illustrates the advantages of DeLorme in currency, positional accuracy, and level of detail.”
DeLorme’s been around the block a few times in its 30-odd years in the geo-market so the company does have some good data. The real question is whether it’ll be able to compete with an already extremely competitive mapping industry dominated by Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ. In many ways, DeLorme’s success could come down to how flexible it is with licensing fees. Of course, no matter how little the company charges for its data, the popular and quickly growing Open Street Map will always be right there. With the low, low price of $0.
