Using Crowd Sourced Data in a Commercial Mapping API

John McKerrell discusses using crowd-sourced data from sources like Geonames, Wikipedia, and Flickr in Multimap's commercial mapping API. Wikipedia data is hard to parse but people were helpful when contacted. Flickr photos sometimes had nothing to do with the location and there was little moderation of user-submitted data. While the Flickr integration was never released, it served as a proof-of-concept for Multimap's API capabilities.