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Why the World Needs OpenStreetMap
An anonymous reader writes "Over the past six months, we've all grown a bit more skeptical about who controls our data, and what they do with it. An article at The Guardian says it's time for people to start migrating en masse away from proprietary map providers to OpenStreetMap in order to both protect our collective location data and decide how it is displayed. From the article: 'Who decides what gets displayed on a Google Map? The answer is, of course, that Google does. I heard this concern in a meeting with a local government in 2009: they were concerned about using Google Maps on their website because Google makes choices about which businesses to display. The people in the meeting were right to be concerned about this issue, as a government needs to remain impartial; by outsourcing their maps, they would hand the control over to a third party. ... The second concern is about location. Who defines where a neighborhood is, or whether or not you should go? This issue was brought up by the American Civil Liberties Union when a map provider was providing routing (driving/biking/walking instructions) and used what it determined to be "safe" or "dangerous" neighborhoods as part of its algorithm.'"
Open Street
Can nae be beat
With proper ads
Every so many feet
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The level of detail is just fantastic, and I can carry the entire map on an sd card for offline use, including routing. It's plain awesome.
Wish it would return.
even the oldie-goldie paper maps were outsourced except for the larger cities (not states or countries).
ACLU can protest, but I'd far rather have a system that gets me around neighborhoods where I get a gun shoved in my face for my ride, then another with the trigger pulled in my face for being the wrong race in the wrong place.
In fact, I wouldn't mind a service that can make and keep current heat maps so I can glance at somewhere like Cleveland or LA and know what routes to take so I don't end up having my vehicle (and my cranium) perforated by .40 ammo so a gangbanger can "blood in" and show it off via a YouTube video.
There was a company that was doing heat maps of crime, but they have not done a single update in two years.
Objected to the way ghetto POS neighborhoods full of "attractive and successful african americans" were labeled unsafe and thus avoided? Color me shocked.
Somehow I envision a Wikipedia of maps, with boundaries and street names changing at random if two groups can't agree.
Sure it may not happen in downtown Topeka, but imagine to geo-edit wars that will happen in the Middle East or other disputed territory.
Three Squirrels
Any move away from a single minded, publicly traded corporation is a good thing. The worst is yet to come.
Brave Sir Robin ran away. ("No!") Bravely ran away away. ("I didn't!")
how to get to Sesame Street?
... any time of the day or night, carrying around my Retina Display MacBook Pro, chatting up the meanest, nastiest ugliest hoodlums. Because I look just like a Hell's Angel. In reality I'm a coder with a degree in Physics. You could knock me flat by looking at me funny. It's all about how you carry yourself.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
Okay, while I love the idea of Open Street Maps, if you have you have moderate traffic it becomes problematic because.... Nominatim. The backend DIY portion of Open Street Maps requires a 32GB server to run! That's insanity.
I support everything the author is talkin' about with moving away from proprietary providers, but this sort of puts up a large barrier to entry for most people needing a bit more than maps for a casual website.
You say, "$800 a month for a server is a drop in the hat compared to your bottom line... or should be!" and I agree with that, but unfortunately, setting up, administrating, configuring, updating, etc require someone with expertise in it-- who is probably MUCH more costly than the $800/month server. You then need to worry about availability, because it's on you... It's costly.
Again, I love all of this, I just wish there was more work towards making it more viable for small-medium sized users.
p.s. If I totally missed a key portion of the Open Street maps docs that solve all my woes, please let me know! I'd love to leave the Goog's iron grasp, but right now we're unable to hire an engineer just to deal with our mapping software when we can just pay Google $10-$20k per year. Or if anyone knows of any good providers of Open Steet map data please mention 'em!
"Who defines where a neighborhood is, or whether or not you should go? This issue was brought up by the American Civil Liberties Union when a map provider was providing routing (driving/biking/walking instructions) and used what it determined to be "safe" or "dangerous" neighborhoods as part of its algorithm.'"
That doesn't come from the map provider though. That data is from someone else, overlaid on ANY map providers map... using OpenStreetMap changes that not a whit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sure, that would be really nice. But as we all know it's totally racist to admit that black people commit crimes. So we can't do that.
One example of what the world needs is an Authentic Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that would protect anyone that wants to protect people by providing a map of dangerous neighborhoods!
using crime stats to overlay and provide safer routing is a great feature. if that happens to show an ethnic neighborhood is like being in a Mad Max movie, so be it. I for one don't feel like I'm contributing to diversity and equal opportunity by letting a minority rob or maim or kill me.
I don't see how an open map solves the problem of the annotated street map that is "politically incorrect" but useful. Bike lanes marked which are dangerously exposed and poorly maintained, especially in winter. Streets and neighborhoods even the prostitutes avoid.
hey asshole, i live and work in 'those' neghborhoods, and at most i jaywalk
quit talking about facts, this is a lynch mob!!!
Screw all proprietary services (except for Slashdot and corporate companies)
so you admit that you're a criminal. great, we're getting somewhere!
...or assume that white people don't.
I hate to fall back onto freemarkets self regulating in these scenarios, but actually this is exactly what I see happening here and for search in general.
Maps are only as good as their accuracy and their results. Just look at the backlash against Apple maps, and the number of people who installed the Google Maps app when Apple maps went through it's hilariously bad teething phase.
People don't use maps that aren't accurate, so if I can't find something on one map, I go to another, and if I find one map to be more accurate then I stick with that map. Internally politicising results is suicide for a company that produces this kind of service.
If Google isn't careful, they will loose this race. Right now it is a bit of a toss up. It wasn't always so. A few years ago OSM was just toy, and the Android Google Maps app did a reasonable job of offline maps and searching the local area. My how things have changed.
On the one hand Google has been busily removing features from it's Maps app. I think they were trying to make it easier to use. Whether they achieved that is debatable, but what they done is make it less useful. You can't measure distances now, the search for local places of interest is all but useless, there is no way to find out what maps are available for offline use.
OsmAnd+ on the other hand has acquired one big missing feature - directions, navigation and voice. Amazingly its point of interest search works much better than Google, possibly because the locals enter the point of interest data. And it always had a number of features Google Maps doesn't:
Normally I would not bet against Google. But collecting traffic and public transport out of the realms of possibility for Osm. If that happens, I can't think why anybody would choose to use Google Maps over OSM.
Yup, crime statistics are public information.
The next thing you know the ACLU or some Cities will be anonymizing crime statistics to protect feelings.
Responses to 911 calls will be dispatched to random addresses so as not to cast aspersions.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Bugger that, can I pay Google to have more people routed past my billboards?
Great. Could we also have maps showing where bankers, investment counselors and other white-collar criminals live? The only difference is when they steal they don't use a gun.
This is destined to be an epic fail. It could certainly fulfill CURRENT expectations. But this is what is naive. What about expectations 3 years from now?
Google is a company with the desire and means to change the world.
And this idea is the 2013 idea of a database.
Google wants to do stuff involving speed limits and probably road signs (no turn on red in the USA as an example).
An obsolete by design and lack of planning 2013 idea of an open database is going to be thrashed hard, no matter the quality. But then there is the quality issue too!
Google has every financial motivation to invest many resources into a database and system to compete in the idea-space for the future. Meanwhile, Open Source has never been that good at databases. This database will be useful, but it will be obsolete and archaic and inadequate compared to what Google has even now.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Let me see if I can put this delicately. If you care about this you're an idiot. (Oh well.).
If you're driving around what you really want is a "heat map" of traffic accidents. If you're walking around what you really want is a "heat map" of pedestrian deaths. And so on...
Stressing out about stray bullets, even in a "bad neighborhood" is only one step up from worrying about lightning strikes.
(Note: I live in West Oakland. Everyone is excited that they're were only 92 homicides in Oakland last year.)
Great. Could we also have maps showing where bankers, investment counselors and other white-collar criminals live? The only difference is when they steal they don't use a gun.
You still don't get it, do you?
When they steal, they don't even commit a crime.
And you better believe they fucking wrote it that way.
It started on his blog, was reprinted in Gizmodo and now the Guardian.
I agree with most of the article, but having a mapping application that routes me around a known bad neighborhood when I'm in an unfamiliar city is a good thing, not a bad thing. In our own cities, we're generally decently aware of which areas are not a great place to drive at 9pm on a weekend but that sort of local knowledge is lost when visiting a new city.
I'm sure on some narrow philosophical grounds it can be considered "unfair" to route traffic away from a spot that's known for carjackings ("but the burger stand there is awesome - you're (literally) driving away potential customers!") but let's be real. I've had dumb GPS units on rental cars route me through some pretty sketchy areas - as well as "roads" that were cut for local moonshiners to reach their stills who didn't much care for the Yankee driving thru "their" holler.
note that it actually talks about "Who defines where a neighborhood is", as in neighbourhood borders
Rich
when i was in south africa, i was told that in central johannesburg people sometimes get robbed of their cars. stop at the red light, two cars come. one stops in front of you, one behind you, a couple of guys with guns throw you out of your car. :)
"traffic accidents" would not be enough
Rich
(This is a cycling computer.)
Good: It showed all the street detail, *plus* it showed the offroad trails not shown by the Garmin maps.
Bad: The navigation functionality no longer worked.
I have found that Navteq -> Nokia -> Here have the best maps AND the best Link / Node sources.
Google just plain sucks because you have to feed from their API but they do have damn accurate maps, as to their routing engine well...
OSM is pretty good but the level of cruft is quite high and takes a LOT of work to make it usable so...
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
The ACLU people should just use Garmin. I was driving with my SiL and her family a couple years back because they were unfamiliar with the area and she wanted to follow the Garmin. Its directions were becoming exceedingly sketchy, but whatever, until it wanted her to turn down a dark alley in a seedy part of a city with one of the worst crime rates on the East Coast.
At that point I said, "hell no, go straight, take the first left, a quick right, the next left, and take the entrance ramp to the highway." (I'd been watching the roads the Garmin should have put us on).
So, those concerned about offending somebody can just use Garmin. In the meantime, somebody tell me which map routing algorithms use crime data to adjust their routes so I can give them some money.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I agree, we should use OSM, so we make it bigger and better. But as I have to make a website were there're pinned points in a city map so everyone can see it, OSM is not useful for me. Sadly, it can't replace "Google My Places"..yet
This is currently inavailable: http://open.mapquest.com/
Or may be I'm overlooking, I just need a map where I can mark places and probably attach photos to it (like to show the front of a starbucks store). But in a whole country. As far as I can know, can't do it with OSM, without serious work.
I always found Nokia maps to be better than Google maps on my phone, but I haven't used it since Nokia switch to Microsoft only.
I'm looking forward to trying 'here maps', which is what came out of it in the shake, once it is available for other platforms : http://here.com/
However, I guess it has similar issues to Google in this context.
Max.
Measuring distance in a straight line isn't all that important.
Really? Then why do you see a measurement scale on nearly EVERY printed map.
And that's in a realm where you have to further approximate by holding something against the scale, then against the map...
In a digital map scale is even more vital, because you can zoom in and out and quickly lose track of exactly how far distances are at your current zoom level.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
another inaccurate map do-hicky that feels the need to photograph my house, but this time I can vote in a committee of the entire world
la de da
I'm hardly a fan of google (real name policy... [spits]) but the "open" spam lists make decisions about email addresses, often wrong, very difficult to deal with for the innocent person, nearly impossible for one who doesn't understand what happened. Email providers make decisions to use same. Anything with GPL rejects closed commercial use and improvement. Individual OS projects make many decisions without user input (hey, your Python / Perl upgrade is incompatible with your code... you DID want that, right?) The USG makes decisions about who to list on the no fly, no buy, felon, offender, terrorist lists... often wrong and/or wholly inappropriate, and virtually impossible to remediate when wrong. Bottom line is that there's no impartial source of data and/or decisions out there. You just have to pick the one that's most in line with your outlook and hope they remain that way.
I have a lot of friends who proudly contribute to google maps. Whenever I try push them towards OSM, the response is. Its not good enough. roads are missing. POIs are less.
Its like a big whoosh.
OSM is user generated. More users will mean better maps. Looks at Europe. We did a trip in norway, and we could navigate perfectly just with OSM. Why? Because of local participation.
Secondly, we have lost a lot of battles. Today facebook decides what content to show. Want your status update to be seen? Well pay money. The corporations have one agenda. Gamify and monetize. We need to get out and reclaim whatever we can.
And OSM is just one of the pieces of the puzzle. If more and more people started contributing, there is no reason for OSM to be inferior. For example, the Indian city of Chennai is as well mapped as google.
More users means more developers come and develop better routing algorithms. Better POI searches. Better map features.
So if you don't like OSM in your area, Fix it. Its not too difficult. To get something, if you expect some corporation to come and do it for you, remember they will do it in a way it benefits them. To get what you want, you have to make an effort.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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Crime maps are available for many cities. Unfortunately, there was a lot of noise made a while back about decreased property values and business losses when crime stats were going to be included in driving directions.
Google Maps and my Garmin can route my around traffic, but they sometimes insist I drive into bad neighborhoods. That's fine in the greater metro area that I live in, since I know how dangerous various areas are. It's not so good when I'm in a strange town.
I was out of town for work, and told the people at the site where the maps had me drive through. They asked how many times I was shot at. Apparently they weren't the safest neighborhoods. Fortunately, the locals, while dangerous, couldn't hit a moving vehicle.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Google for geofabrik comparing tool. Gives you instantly differences in splitted view.
But remember that osm di has much more beyond what's rendered online
When Maps is included in Android, it's hard to compete with it.
Or will government require another "ballot screen" for it?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
No thanks!
Thats one of the things i hate the most about googles stuff.
If they are just going to be sheep, and copy the wort parts, who needs them.
Id rater use a shitty original, than a shitty copy.
So just how "Open" is "OpenStreetMap"?
Can I download the data and set up my own server in case OpenStreetmap closes it's free access?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Google's bike routing is famously weird and iffy. OSM's is based on route tagging with bike route identifiers, which are done by bike nerds because they care. Winner.
Trollnng is easily reverted, and where there are revert wars the same system as wikipedia is used: areas or elements are locked from editing by the gods.
The usual wiki quality rule applies: things rez in from vague to astonishingly specific.
I work professionally with mapping from several sources. For reference and comparison I check against OSM data as well, and would love to use it regularly, but my experience has been that OSM is not always accurate (that is an understatement to be frank. For example, a city close to the city I live in has a point location roughly 10 miles off from where it actually is in the detailed OSM data. People don't always see that data, only a map result, but that data is essential for routing and path planning). In addition, OSM's geocoding is not very flexible, and, geocoding applications built on top - such as gisgraphy - do not have the same level of address matching AI / fuzzy logic in to determine locations from incomplete or inaccurate addresses. I and other colleagues have written my own fuzzy matching and heuristic address matching that is better than either OSM or gisgraphy - but unfortunately it's for proprietary use so I / we cannot contribute it.
I want OSM to work. It would be nice, but, for the moment it's not quite up to prime time. I see the comments here saying "it's what Google maps should have been" and so on, but, working with and comparing with not only Google but other map providers, I cannot agree - yet...
When they happened to show Kashmir as part of Pakistan.
http://propakistani.pk/2008/12/24/nokia-shows-kashmir-pakistan/
The point he was making was that traffic accidents would cover everything that you need to worry about. A rare but well publicized event with some thugs robbing a person in a car just isn't important.
Carjackings are very common in certain locales. It's not idiotic to worry about such things. Things aren't quite as bad as the 70s and 80s now, but if you're the wrong color, it can be extremely dangerous to drive through certain neighborhoods at certain times.
when i was in south africa, i was told that in central johannesburg people sometimes get robbed of their cars. stop at the red light, two cars come. one stops in front of you, one behind you, a couple of guys with guns throw you out of your car. :)
"traffic accidents" would not be enough
If you're lucky. A guy in our building in Joburg was carjacked at the lights, but the guy fired the pistol having failed to remove the keys.
Fortunatly it jammed, and the would-be jacker took his time clearing the gun why the chap escaped. When Group 4 arrived 10 minutes later they found both the misfired bullet with a dent in the back, a few spent casings, and a bullet hole in the back of the car.
Lucky escape, I'd rather drive in gaza than joburg.
You may not think of yourself as being sheltered, but if you live someplace where random violence is not a serious concern, then, compared to many of us, you are. Drive-bys, jackings, and other attacks against drivers are so common in Cleveland and even some of the inner suburbs as to be un-noteworthy unless someone dies, and rarely reported to police. (Sometimes they are commited BY police.) No one walks if they can help it, and while a lot of people do take buses if they have to, this is what befell a young man just a few days ago, across the street from my old grade school and one block away from Lake Erie, for the "crime" of trying to take a bus to his job at the Cleveland Clinic at 5am.
Nonaggression works!
Exactly, so running or driving through their neighborhoods won't result in you getting a gun shoved in your face.
See http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/
No, it is not at all like that, because 521 N 1st St. (Brooklyn) is most certainly within the current boundaries of the City of New York. Alexandria is most certainly not within the current boundaries of the District of Columbia.
Do you also look for things in "Richmond" when searching in Staten Island? You'd be the only one.
We assume they are, but a large majority of the time they are relying on a combination of outdated information and bias from news reporting (or straight up racism).
When I lived in Southwest DC, about 10 years ago, on the first day people at the office semi-joked that they might not see me tomorrow. There was (and still is) some crime in the area, but these people would make you think it was worse than Thunderdome. Some people even said they did not go east of 16th St. NW. For some reason this was a valid opinion despite having no evidence to support it. Similarly, how many people still think Harlem is a bad neighborhood?
Also the amount of random crime, particularly shootings, is much lower than most people think. That's why those stories make the news, which feeds the bias.
Right, they use a lawyer, which is scarier.
The people I am talking about are not Americans.. they are Indians :)
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Many online maps are low contrast so that overlays (e.g. tracks in different colors, polygonal areas, markers) will stand out. With the OpenStreetMap data, one can set up their own rendering styles; here are some examples.
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