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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.
As places like "Great place to get nice weed" or "Has sluts inside" .
It's a sore one.
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
Err what? For road name you click on the existing street in the editor and change the "name" field. Hit the "Save" button, wait 2 minutes and refresh the map. You are correct that dentist/doctor isn't in the presets (although veterinarian is...) but that doesn't mean you can't map it. See the OSM wiki for more "tags" that you can use to label things.
What gives you the impression you can't mark dentist/doctors offices or fix street names? For example, click on the street whose name you want to fix. On the left column you should see a list of attributes for that street. You can change it there and click Save. Done!
Wikimapia does not distribute their data with an open license. Even if they did, every single drop of their data was derived from Google Maps satellite and map data, breaking the Google terms of use. I imagine if you tried to do anything serious with Wikimapia data you would get slapped by Google.
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.
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