Monopoly City Streets
If you know about the current state of affairs, please help keep everyone informed by updating this information. (Discussion)
Welcome to the OpenStreetMap Community
We're glad that you are here. This page will tell you about how OpenStreetMap and Monopoly City Streets are related, and how you can participate directly in OpenStreetMap.
How did I get here?
Were you visiting the Monopoly City Streets web site? Did you click on the link for more information about OpenStreetMap?
What is Monopoly City Streets?
Monopoly City Streets is an on line game from Hasbro. It was introduced in a blog post on 27 August 2009:
- This autumn, MONOPOLY is launching a game of property empire building on an unimaginable scale in a bid to uncover the greatest property magnate the world has ever known.
- The entire planet will be pitted against one another in an online game of MONOPOLY turning the globe into one giant game board!
What is OpenStreetMap?
OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project to make beautiful maps available to everybody so that they can do creative and interesting things. OpenStreetMap was created by Steve Coast in 2004 and over 150,000 people from around the globe were participating as of August 2009.
Monopoly City Streets launched in September 2009 using map images from Google Maps and map data from OpenStreetMap for the streets that you can buy. You may have noticed that the streets on the map do not exactly fit the (blue/purple/red) street overlays, or that the spelling of the name of a street is different, or that you cannot buy a street at all. All that is because the street data comes from OpenStreetMap, but the map images do not.
The OpenStreetMap data used in Monopoly City Streets is from before mid-July 2009.
 If you buy a street in Marrakech, Morocco, it won't be aligned to the background map from Google Maps.... |
 ...But if you compare the streets you can buy with the same area in OpenStreetMap.org, it makes sense. |
 On the other hand, you can not buy streets in some cities that appear complete in Google Maps... |
 ... Because OpenStreetMap data on the area is scarce and/or incomplete. |
But I found something wrong in the map! / A street is missing!
As the OpenStreetMap data used in the game is quite old, and the project is really active, you may find that the data is already fixed and updated. If not, then you can help by going out and surveying your local area to update OpenStreetMap data. Read on to the next question for more information.
Can I participate in OpenStreetMap?
Yes! You can help to improve the OpenStreetMap data. The most common methods of editing the data include:
- Local knowledge, and editing the OpenStreetMap data based on the other data already there. For example when you know that a post office or shop is on the corner of two streets, you can add it at that corner. Walking Papers is a useful tool for this.
- Tracing from Yahoo satellite imagery as a backdrop in the online editor called Potlatch.
- Using a GPS and walking, cycling or driving around your local area. You can then take the trace into the editors to be able to see where you have been in relation to the current data. You can use that to help you to draw some new streets. You may want to take some photos and use some photo sync utilities in the editors.
See the Beginners' Guide for more information.
Can I copy information from Google Maps?
Please do not copy from other copyrighted data, for example from Google Maps. We're trying to build a clean room set of data free of third party copyright restrictions.
Will Monopoly City Streets be updated with newer OSM data?
That is unknown right now. It is up to Hasbro and the Monopoly City Streets team to decide whether to update the data or not.
And before you think about creating fake streets in OSM so you'll have a safe investment haven in MCS: OSM is constantly checking the quality of the data; MCS may update certain portions of the planet after a review; and if that behaviour is ever observed, it would be most probably heavily penalized by both OSM and MCS.
Did Hasbro ask permission to OpenStreetMap to use the street data?
No, because nobody has to ask permission to use OpenStreetMap Data. The goal of the project is to have free-as-in-free-speech geographical data for everyone to use, for any purpose. Anybody can download a copy of all of OpenStreetMap's database and do anything they like with it. On the other hand, when people add data to OpenStreetMap, they acknowledge that anyone can download and use that data without explicitly asking for permission.
I have a further question about OpenStreetMap, to whom should I ask it?
See the Contact page. You can get help from other fellow OpenStreetMappers by either our forum, the talk@ mailing list, IRC, and others.