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Why We Need OpenStreetMap (Video)
This video is a conversation between Slashdot's Timothy Lord and informal OpenStreetMap spokesman Serge Wroclawski. Serge stresses the point that OpenStreetMap isn't a mapping application, but consists of the data behind mapping applications; that there are many apps that use OpenStreetMap data; and that you are free to use OpenStreetMap as the data engine behind a map-based application. You are also welcome, even encouraged, to contribute, and you may want to check out the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which is "an international not-for-profit organization supporting, but not controlling, the OpenStreetMap Project." Now comes the question: Do you really want Google or MapQuest or another commercial (or government) entity to know where you are and where you're going? With OpenStreetMap you can download maps of your area, country or even the whole world and keep your travels confidential. You can also help create accurate maps of the areas you know best, including points of interest chosen by actual users like you, not because they paid to have their names on a commercially-produced map. A last thought: In addition to watching Serge in the video, you might want to read an article Serge wrote for his blog that The Guardian picked up about the need for OpenStreetMap. The 195+ comments attached to the article are interesting, too.
Anything that knocks Google (and Apple) down a peg or ten is good in my book.
How about an open building/area tagging like the non-open Wikimapia ? I don't want just points of interest, I want to know everything there is to know (publicly) about an area.
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
OpenStreetMap is OK but is really just a pale imitation of Googol maps. In their attempt to justify OpenStreetMap they completely miss the point:
First they say:
in the 1800s clocks existed, but every town had its own time, "local time"
But then try to justify the need for OpenStreetMap by saying:
In terms of display (rendering), each person or company who creates a map is free to render it how they like
So now you're back to the same problem. But instead of clocks being different from one town to another, it's maps.
The other problem is:
OpenStreetMap is a wiki-like map that anyone in the world can edit. If a store is missing from the map, it can be added in by a store owner or even a customer.
In other words, if OppenStreetMap were to replace Googol maps in popularity, we can look forward to Wikipedia-like edit and delete wars.
The other guys have that.
I actually pushed to add OpenStreetMap tile support to our geo-spatial stuff at work. I even went and made a VM with the world database and pre-compiled metatiles so I wouldn't hammer their official servers. It's definitely nice to have imagery (even if it isn't satellite) even if you're on a standalone network and don't have internet access.
When anyone can download a few hundred gigs and build their own maps server I see that as a good thing (TM).
-SaNo
Sure google/apple won't know which map you are looking at...
They'll just know everyting else about your trip, from researching information on logistics to points of interest. And that's before you go there and get tracked in real time. Then when you're back, they'll have all the extra comments you attach to your pictures, just in case your best friend is going around phone-free.
flashblock - i'd lose my lunch if /'tard goes to video
openwlanmap.org uses it to display maps of wifi-war-drived-data when you submit any. I scanned wifi-access points while driving to France for a holiday; amazing how many access points you detect even in the middle of nowhere!
Also my toy-project O2OO uses its api (very simple to implement!) to draw car-sensor data of a trip you made on a map. Nice to see how e.g. the load of the engine changes when taking a corner or driving uphill ("duh" I hear you say, but it is nice to see how much it changes).
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The OpenStreetMap people are trying to fix problems that don't actually exist.
So what? When I search an address, Google shows me where it is. By looking at the map i can see that I need to take street A to Street B and turn left on street C. I don't need a big label that says "LOLS HEREZ TEH PLACE UR LOOKING FOR".
If you're too stupid to look past the first search result, that's your problem.
Yes, because god forbid we should actually tell the truth about something and admit that certain areas have much higher crime rates than others. If you don't like an area being designated as "unsafe" feel free to ignore it and go about your business. What happens after that is your problem, not mine.
In some more than in others.
OpenStreetMap identifiers are not stable (at least according to a 2011 post), which makes reusing and linking OpenStreetMap data a bit challenging. Did that change?
Which is sucky since the RSS feed links randomly to the beta version of articles.
Downloading maps doesn't hide your location. Your cell phone is still pinging off cell towers and can be triangulated fairly accurately by by the cell towers using only signal strength, which is information it already has in hand in order to handle tower handoffs. If you are talking about a non-communications enabled navigation device, then you might as well buy a Garmin or one of the others, which already have the maps data internally.
it performs better in my browser than google maps, i can glide from place to place by dragging the map around in my browser, google maps is a slow bloated piece of crap because of all the features google bloated their map up with, so yeah i am in favor of openstreetmap surviving
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I can't speak to the edit/delete wars issue, because I don't know the rules under which it operates.
But without resorting to the use of hugely expensive satellite imagery, and official sources, and mapping that to known points, openstreetmaps misses a lot of the less traveled roads, even in countries like the US where everyone is carrying a cell phone with GPS turned on. Look into south america and the quality drops off quite a bit.
Enthusiasts may run mapping apps and contribute, but until they can get a large segment of people doing so they will always be behind the curve.
There are some mapping track submission apps for Android and probabl for IOS, but these are fairly crude and battery hogging things. They are unwieldy, and more than a little geeky to use.
What they really need is something that will track your location and speed on your phone. Anything over 15 to 20 indicates some sort of vehicle. Just record that on your phone, and not upload it. Then, (when connected to wifi or on the charger perhaps), download just those map segments needed and compare that to the recorded track. Any travel at speed NOT on a known road, would periodically submitted. When there is enough evidence to suggest a road from enough different users, they could add the road to the map.
That way, they can make up for the lack of official sources and satellite imagery by using the power of thousands of phones without users having to do anything other than install the app, and key in some random digits to use for anonamizing the submissions.
Google gets real time traffic data via this method, so we already know it works.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Bing has been providing satellite imagery for several years.
A better track collection story is a good idea.
Why's Obi Wan Kenobi on this call, watching from the bottom right?
Why's Obi Wan Kenobi on the call, watching from the bottom right?
You're jumping to unwarranted conclusions. OSM usually has better detailed and more accurate data than Google Maps. Don't take my word for it, though - look for yourself: OSM: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#... GMaps: https://www.google.com/maps/pr... OSM: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#... GMaps: https://www.google.com/maps/pr... OSM: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#... GMaps: https://www.google.com/maps/pr... OSM: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#... GMaps: https://www.google.com/maps/pr...
I wrote the article, but I didn't write it *for* The Guardian. They picked it up and syndicated it, as did Gizmodo ( http://gizmodo.com/why-the-wor... ), but the original is still on my blog: http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2...
Fascinating topic, and I'd love to check it out but TOO BAD the video requires the craptastic Adobe Flash plugin. It's 2014, Flash is dying and HTML5 is the real way of doing things now. And Slashdot is supposed to be the home of FOSS-friendly early-adopting geeks? WTF?
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Way to cherry pick your area:
https://www.google.com/maps?q=...
http://www.openstreetmap.org/r...
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In recent years, OpenStreetmap has been used more and more in disaster response. This is because the data can be updated easily by volunteers on the ground, and it can easily serve as the basis for custom maps. A number of organizations have been in the news in recent years with their work in disaster response and OpenStreetmap. For example, MapAction.org, iMMAP.org, and SahanaFoundation.org, and probably others. I'm sure they use google maps too, but the OpenStreetmap source provides flexibility that none of the other commercial mapping sources can.
Whatever point you were trying to make failed in the delivery. Check your links.
Try this: GMaps: https://www.google.com/maps/pr... OSM: http://www.openstreetmap.org/r...
Looks like the only difference is that OSM gives us more information.
What I would love to see, is something like OSM but with a much more temporary dataset.
Right now there are a lot of apps that let you enter road hazard or police data. The trouble is that's only going up to one server, not helping the people that use all the other apps.
I would love to see some centralization, or more likely federalization of this data - so that you could use and contribute to temporary road condition events while helping (and being helped) from a much wider pool of people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've been trying out OsmAnd+ and its route calculation is a bit shit.
On my way home from work it tells me to exit the motorway, go through the intersection then go back on the motorway. wtf?
Even trying to get out the city, it kept telling me to turn off the street I was on, which is a straight one-way street that goes directly to the motorway and go back through the city to take another onramp.
Going in to work it tries to take me through the most narrow and congested streets possible.
The probem with OSM is not the data, it is the application presenting it.
Google maps even today gives best user experience in UI
Links work fine for me. Check your browser. (Also, note that Slashdot seems to have recently grown the habit of truncating long URLs in comments, while leaving the HREF intact. Firefox dropping the status bar into oblivion in does not help clarify things, either. PEBKAC.)
And...a bit of whitespace would've been preferable in the presentation, but it's not so bad.
That said, I clicked the links, I briefly compared these maps OSM/Google of places that I am not familiar with, and I still don't get the point.
Every map has problems. Every modern electronic map has a mechanism in-place for those problems to be fixed. In terms of navigating roadways, the degree of accuracy depends more on the area and the familiarity of the folks working on it than anything else.
Each of Waze, OSM, Google allow users to edit maps with varying degrees of limitation and peer moderation. For the sake of completeness, I've fixed all three of these maps for my hometown...and submitted changes to Garmin for their own map, which got folded into the next release.
If even a small percentage of geeks here spent a bit of time scoping out their usual stomping grounds for even just the most egregious of map errors and fixed them, these maps would all be in fine navigable shape in no time for even the least-traveled of crossroads.
And then, the end-user can pick the best system for their particular application....which is how it's supposed to be, right?
For my own purposes, I use Waze like a religion when driving because it sends data home. And by virtue of sharing this data, it helps me get from A to B faster and with fewer headaches. I sometimes instead use an old standalone Garmin because it is a totally self-contained, offline solution (at least aside from GPS availability) -- something that is likely to work, when other things are failing. (And I keep a paper road map in the car, just in case.)
I don't use Google Maps much at all, because there is no public transportation here and everything else it does overlaps with Waze. And I don't use OSM at all because their dataset is huge, hard to manage and perhaps too-complete, and trying to navigate with it and keep it updated and massage it is frustrating when all I really want to be doing is driving the car and be reminded of my next turn.
The mileage of others may (should!) vary.
Kid-proof tablet..
Weird, I don't see any video in this post when I'm using the new beta layout.
Better still, look here: Map Compare
(side by side comparison of OSM, Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc.)
A few years back - a little before Google released free SatNav software for mobile phones - I made some significant progress in writing a SatNav app of my own. But the further I got with it, the more I realised that it couldn't easily be effective in the UK. Because in the UK postcodes (ZIP codes to you Americans) are not freely available. You have to buy the database for thousands of pounds (which is also thousands of dollars) from the Royal Mail.
There are websites like http://www.freethepostcode.org/ that are trying to create a free version of the database, but the quality there is terrible. So low, that it can't be successfully used for SatNav purposes.
If OSM is to do much better in the UK, we really needs a legal reform to declare that postcodes are owned by the public - which they really should be.
He doesn't mean the links are dead, but that they fail to prove your point. The OSM map in your example is still more detailed than that in Google Maps.
And you'll see that huge numbers of the web sites you visit pull javascript modules off of Google's servers...
Slashdot for example.
If you leave it running for a day or so, you'll see that Google is very firmly the central point for information gathering about you.
I can tell you, because I wrote a blog post about it:
http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2...
(I'm the author of the original article- ie I'm the guy in the video)
I checked out OSM after the last /. story on the subject after years of forgetting about it. I checked out where I live (a small village), and sure enough there were some crazy errors (eg. a circular road not connected to any other - I'd love to see something like this in real life!), but a couple of minutes with the mouse and they're all fixed now. I also added in some extra detail I happen to know quite well.
What I'd like to see is what my TomTom and g-maps and as far as I know everyone else lacks - I'd like to add some meta to the roads. For example, a road might have a 30mph speed limit, but it's got mountainous speed humps every 50 yards, so it's a really crappy cut-through. Roads near me often lack pavements - that could be really handy to know when I'm out running, or taking the kids out in their push chair (or in the future, on their scooters, roller-skates or whatever). Single track roads can either be easy or hard to drive down - if there are lots of good sized passing places that aren't a matter of trying to put your car into an overgrown hedge, then it's easier than those roads that have high hedgerows either side and very few passing places. I could go on to poor visibility junctions, blind corners where people driving in the opposite direction always seem to be in the middle of the road, and countless other phenomena that would be really great to know about on a map. I'm sure you get the idea.
So anyway... I've told the Internet what my wishlist is. I dare say it'll all be implemented by the end of the week ;-)
They use the same map provider as TomTom. Whether that's better than OpenStreetMap or not probably depends on where you are... I've personally never had issues with map accuracy from any providers, but my travels so far have been exclusively in densely populated parts of Europe and the U.S., which are probably well mapped in any case.
N.B. I don't mean to advertise Sygic specifically; I'm sure other stand-alone navigation apps exist that are just as good. My point is that if you don't want Google to always know where you are, and are leery of the accuracy of community-provided maps, there are good alternatives.
Data quality management and object relational data structures are not a mature feature on OSM and may never be, since you would need to agree on a "road-map" to get there, (chortle). In another words in open source, especially in maps and mapping it is hard to get an agreement, especially when most contributors and self styled administrators aren't particularly up to speed in regards to advanced technical issues in data quality and object oriented attribution.
You'd be tempted to believe that, till you clicked the Sat View button or zoomed in closer and had Google Streetview pop up
Then there is all of that utterly useless forest of links down the side of the Openstreetmap page.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What is my point?
Which OSM map is in my example? (I don't remember making a comparative example.)
Who are you replying to, anyway?
Kid-proof tablet..
And looking around my area using that tool. The only map that's correct for the road network isn't on that tool, and that's Waze's map.