There have been a few exciting changes at OpenCelliD, the largest Open Database of Cell Towers, over the past week and I’m here to update you about it. Markus Semm, the man who built and brought OpenCelliD to where it is today, has transferred its maintainership responsibilities to Unwired Labs.
In the past few years, OpenCelliD was funded by Markus’ personal funds and he’s taken care of all the development and infrastructure efforts and have single-handedly cleaned up the datasets and made it a reliable source. He believed it was time for it to grow further under a new custodian.
Who are we?
Unwired Labs is a leading geolocation company that specialises in Cell-tower & WiFi based positioning. We’ve been around for 4 years, but in this short while, we’ve rapidly built our partnership networks for data, helped thousands of developers/ startups create better products.
How is it going to help?
We believe in open-source and realize that it is a major contributor to geolocation services. We aim to improve OCIDs datasets, modernize its infrastructure and take it towards becoming a major open-source dataset for Cell, WiFi, IoT Wide area Networks. Unwired is entirely focused on geolocation, so it gives us incentive to share our resources and support the community.
What does this mean for you?
Better data that provides your apps and devices better locations! Also, you won’t have to worry about having to adapt to anything new. All the changes will happen at our end. Your contributions and tokens will stay intact and you will be able to download the database and request removal of your data – just like it was before. We will make sure the transition is smooth. Most importantly it stays open!
We’re really proud and excited to have been handed over this responsibility and are very excited to work with the community!
Onward,
Gopi Aravind
CEO, Unwired
Cool!
So, where is the data?
The original database was published under Creative Commons – and I’ve contributed to the data for my area.
But, now, there is no way to download the data from the web site. Where do I get it now?
You can sign up for an account at opencellid.org & login to your dashboard. It’s under “Downloads”.
There is no such ‘Downloads’ link
You can now download the Database from here: http://opencellid.org/downloads
Please add a warning that clicking that will download almost an entire gigabyte. Show the size so the user can make an informed decision if he wants to click or not.
Also allow the user to download other slices than the entire thing.
That’s a great idea! We’ve added the size for now and splitting things up is on the roadmap.