The last weekend I have been visiting the first State Of The Map (SOTM) - Latam conference in Santiago. At this conference about 110 mappers and users of OpenStreetMap (OSM) came together from Chile, Brasil, Argentina, Peru, the USA, etc. They discussed the progress of mapping the countries of South, Central and North America. Also several presenters showed how one can use the free OpenStreetMap data. For instance UOCT (Unidad Operativa de Control de Transito) showed how they use OSM to create a background map for their traffic status website.

For those who don't know OpenStreetMap yet I like to summarize it in three points:

• OpenStreetMap is a volunteer mapping project with more than 10.000 active mappers that aim to create a detailed map of the world.
• The OpenStreetMappers use  simple tools, such as the iD Broswer Editor, and expert tools, such as JOSM Editor, to create a map and topographic database.
• The geographic data created by the OpenStreetMappers can be downloaded and used freely, because they are distributed under the free "Open Database Licence" license (ODbL).

You want to know more about how to get the data and how to use OpenStreetMap data in your project? Then talk to us at the CEDEUS Observatory (to Stefan or Helen), or head over to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/es for more information.

Below an image showing the new UOCT webpage that uses OpenStreetMap data.