Slashdot Mirror
OpenStreetMap Hits One Million Registered Users
An anonymous reader writes "OSM passed the one million registered users mark! Sure, similar to Wikipedia, the number of active contributors is a factor of 5 lower (something like ~200k) but the growth of data is impressive. So why not have a look at your neighborhood and assist on mapping? Nothing big, just visit OSM bugs and add for example your favorite place and a house number."
... the link to "OSMBugs" in the summary doesn't work.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I prefer wikimapia
As places like "Great place to get nice weed" or "Has sluts inside" .
It's a sore one.
By your command.
Haven't been there in a while. The accuracy in my area (NEPA) was terrible. I had made some improvements, but became discouraged when someone reverted them to mimic what was on Google Maps. Google Maps in horrific in the NEPA area, so I was upset that my work was destroyed by someone who would just blatantly copy. After visiting today, it was nice to see that the NEPA area has been significantly improved. It is much more up to date than my Garmin at this point. It would be nice to get OSM on the thing if the accuracy is improving the way that it has for me. An encouraging project, I just hope that it doesn't get killed by the complaints that routinely get leveraged against Wikipedia.
I would add stuff to my neighborhood but at this point I would almost have to start mapping out individual trees. Well it isn't quite that bad but I do go on OSM binges every now and then and have a lot of the buildings (some with full attributes include), roads, power lines, walking paths, other structures, ponds, parks (including equipment, sports field, toilets, and drinking they contain), parking lots, parking isles, etc mapped out already for my town. Areas that I hunt I have public land outlined as well as correcting the roads and adding in the official or unofficial trails that exist. I find it is a better use of my OCDness than acquiring cats or other things.
Time to offend someone
As of 2010 they changed license to be corporation-friendly (hence Apple started using them). The down side is that they now allow corporations to hide your work behind DRM, and they had to purge contributions from users who disagreed with this.
The problem is in details. I can mark power lines but I can't mark dentist / doctors office.
Also can't fix typos for street names without having to redraw the street.
Cute but I'll pass.
The license didn't actually change until September 2012. That is well after Apple started using OSM in iPhoto maps. Your argument is invalid. The license is essentially a version of Creative Commons that is targeted at databases instead of creative works. It is called the Open Database License
This is incorrect. OpenStreetMap changed licenses midway through 2012 from CC BY-SA to Open Database License. Apple has not confirmed that they're using OSM data, but if they are they would most likely be using OSM data that was obtained before the license change and is thus CC BY-SA. As far as I understand it both licenses allow data to be distributed "behind DRM".
So long as my work is available from OSM itself, it's not hidden by their license. Someone else "using DRM" doesn't automatically make your contributions vanish from the face of the earth, they are still available from the same source as they always were.
*sigh*. Where do you get your info? Certainly not from a reliable source. It is so easy to spread FUD, so hard to refute it, even though it is utter rubbish and the harm is done in an instant. Why not tell the truth? Maybe it just doesn't make you heart beat fast enough. Maybe you should get out more - you could always survey your local area for OSM while you are out and benefit *everyone* who uses it. Of course you could just carry on viciously spreading utter rubbish with no basis in truth and then run back to your corner sniggering like a little troll.
I like OSM and have spent a bunch of time adding edits to it. It's great for things like hiking trails and urban running trails, which usually aren't in google maps. There are some very nice web-based interfaces for making contour maps (example from closedcontour.com). What's really missing is decent driving directions. Yournavigation.org sucks.
Find free books.
Try http://map.project-osrm.org/
As mentioned, http://map.project-osrm.org/ is one of the best routers that uses OSM data. There is also http://open.mapquest.com which might even integrate with the MQ mobile app so you can find a route in a browser, then send it to the MQ app to take in the car. There is also routing on http://maps.cloudmade.com/ although sometimes it seems like they are a little out of date.
But there is code being worked on to integrate OSRM into the osm.org website itself.
Other than looking at OpenStreetBugs, MapRoulette (http://maproulette.org/) is a great way to help out by fixing small data bugs one by one. I hear it's pretty addictive.
Contributing to OSM is not hard. It's like a wiki, you register and you can edit everything. Even if your neighborhood is mapped, you can still work on adding amenities like restaurants, parking spots, post boxes and all the stuff a person that doesn't know the neighborhood would find useful. I personally keep business cards of the good restaurants i visit and post them on OSM regularly.
If you use flash, there's a web-builtin editor called Potlach that's really good. If not, you use jOSM that's shipped with all major distributions and which is also very good (my favorite, even if Java</troll>).
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
Apple has not confirmed that they're using OSM data, but if they are they would most likely be using OSM data that was obtained before the license change and is thus CC BY-SA.
Actually, Apple and they finally got around to crediting them (like they're supposed to do with CC-BY-SA or ODL).
Try Osmand. Its $4 for Android and navigation works. It is also GPL
Since Apple Maps uses OpenStreetMap, I'm not really surprised of the jump in user numbers.
A quick look here:
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosm.php
Suggests roughly twice as many new mappers (at least in the UK) during the last 24 hours than would be normal.
I have a project to geocode (i.e. use an API to give an address, get back latitude and longitude) many many addresses. Sometime, OSM works just fine, and provides just the right answer. It appears that 2/3 of the time this is true. 1/3 of the time, while OSM street data is aware enough to understand street names, it has no way of understanding the numbers. All of the sophisticated OSM guis have a mechanism to add this information. But this is very very complex to use. You have to be able to understand the "address range math" that OSM supports. While the math is very smart, the interface to it is very confusing. The current GUI too does a wonderful job of making tracing and "theres a thing of type X here" very simple, but the ability to add addressing is pretty deep, hidden and confusing. I would like to be able to contribute in some kind of crowd sourced fashion, where I tell my users "hey you might know where this single address is... help me out and enter it into this website!!" With enough individual address samples, the OSM algorithms (I assume) can figure out an entire area.. but I see no such interface. The website is inscrutable to outsiders... Would some OSM person please reply with a "you should try X?" Thanks, -FT
I'd ask that question here:
https://help.openstreetmap.org/
(and yes, the OSM wiki has been described as worse than inscrutable by insiders too - but I wouldn't include that bit in the help question!)
Maybe some sort of wheelmap-like solution would work?
http://blog.wheelmap.org/en/
Try Osmand. Its $4 for Android and navigation works. It is also GPL
It's also free, but sure it's better to support the devs by paying
http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/
has been working for years I think. I did use it in Canada (coming from Europe, I only had euro mapping).
My main issue is rather the Garmin software itself, and I'm patiently waiting for more developed open source turn-by-turn softwares. (what exists on tablets is already striking, including non-monopoly ones like Blackberry -I have great hopes for the coming linux ones)
Herve S.
DRM is a no no with CC-by-SA, it says it like this: "You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict [the access to the work]" ( the CC-by-SA legal code part 4a)
But the license that OSM has adopted, the ODbL will allow you to do what you want with the created map, as long as you give attribution on it (and share the mapdata).
To destroy your own anonymity and privacy. Good work fellas.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I tried OSRM, and it seemed just as bad as yournavigation.org, if not worse. (I wanted to do a side-by-side comparison, but yournavigation apparently isn't working right now due to hosting problems.) As with yournavigation, OSRM breaks the route down into a large number of microscopic parts. Also, when I asked it for directions to 4926 W. Rosecrans Avenue, Hawthorne, CA, it inexplicably changed my request to a request for directions to South Tajauta Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, which is a completely different place. The blue route is also invisible overlaid on top of blue freeways.
Find free books.
Why don't you go ahead and file a bug report. OSRM is under active development.