Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
"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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.