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What OpenStreetMap Can Be (systemed.net)

Posted by msmash on from the marching-forward dept.

An anonymous reader shares a blog post on OpenSourceMap: Most OSM commentary focuses on unimportant minutiae (layers, for goodness' sake, as if it's still 2004) without seeking to examine what makes OSM unique -- and whether that's still relevant in a rapidly changing market. Could OSM become a dead-end curio while Google, Apple, and an increasingly self-sufficient Mapbox hare off in another, common direction? OSM's continuing differentiation from Google/Apple boils down to two points.

First, a non-commercial imperative. Google and Apple (and Mapbox, TomTom, HERE) are beholden to their shareholders and investors. They do what makes them money, which means car navigation. (Once human-controlled, now, increasingly, self-guided. When people ask "How far ahead of Apple is Google Maps?", what they usually mean is "Who will get to self-driving cars first?") OSM, however, isn't ruled by shareholder value, but by the preoccupations of its contributor base. (We'll come onto that demographic later.) Whether that's a good thing depends on what you want from a map. But it's clearly a point of differentation.

Second, ground truthed local knowledge. Surveying by locals is the gold standard of OSM, building a rich, intricate compilation of contributors' preoccupations. The painstaking human curation of areas and topics remains unique to OSM. Neither of these are under threat from Google/Apple. Outsourced quick-fire digitisation of Street View-type imagery in cheap labour countries doesn't give you this. Nor does image recognition. OSM's points of differentation remain clear. In OSM's early days, commentators used the phrase "democratising mapmaking," and it remains true. You choose what to map; and you choose how to use the map. You participate. Other maps are a one-way street: sure, you can contribute (actively through map corrections, or passively through using a mobile app that phones home), but the provider chooses what you get back.

8 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. needs frontend/ui by thePsychologist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    OpenStreetMap is pretty damn good. For example, the OsmAnd android app allows you to browse in excellent detail any offline downloaded map. In this sense it's far superior to Google maps. It can even calculate offline directions.

    The problem is OpenStreetMap is not easy for editing or browsing on a computer. Try finding a GUI. There are two dozen and they all suck. OpenStreetMap needs a professional editor/viewer for all platforms and it could be vastly more popular.

    --
    "What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
    1. Re:needs frontend/ui by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      The problem is OpenStreetMap is not easy for editing or browsing on a computer.

      I have edited OpenStreetMap through the "Edit" button on the web interface at www.openstreetmap.org, and found it a polished and user friendly experience. They have a nice tutorial that leads you through the basics, and then it's quite easy to use. The tutorial is on "scratch" data discarded when you are done so you can try things there without risk.

      In the end, who would contribute to Google or Apple maps voluntarily when you could contribute to OSM and have your edits be part of an open dataset? One you can bulk-download and process on your computer as you see fit, for any purpose you see fit, offline, without being at the mercy of a megacorp for your use of the data?

      Disclaimer:I've got no involvement with OSM here except the above, where I added names of some local lakes that were nameless in the dataset before and added part of a newly constructed road.

    2. Re:needs frontend/ui by Desler · · Score: 2

      In the end, who would contribute to Google or Apple maps voluntarily when you could contribute to OSM and have your edits be part of an open dataset?

      More than a billion people?

    3. Re:needs frontend/ui by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Openstreetmap has a more fundamental problem which explains the bad editors, but also the bad address search capability, the bad default map rendering, the bad homepage map (e.g. same tile map for everyone with local regional language. An American would see Chinese labels in china), and more bad things; It is mainly a database, not an end-user service. It is expected that third parties implement the end-user stuff. Unfortunately, the half-baked homepage map viewer never mentions that, giving newcomers the impression that OSM IS the homepage, and the homepage is poor compared to Google Maps's homepage, "therefore osm is poor".

      This article argues that this model is the main reason OSM is not as successful as it should be: https://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2018/02/16/osm-is-in-trouble/

  2. Contrast is excellent by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 4, Interesting

    OpenStreetMap is pretty damn good. For example, the OsmAnd android app allows you to browse in excellent detail any offline downloaded map. In this sense it's far superior to Google maps. It can even calculate offline directions.

    The problem is OpenStreetMap is not easy for editing or browsing on a computer. Try finding a GUI. There are two dozen and they all suck. OpenStreetMap needs a professional editor/viewer for all platforms and it could be vastly more popular.

    One problem with Google maps is the (lack of) contrast.

    On Google, choose any town or city and Zoom down looking for streets. The streets are juuuuust sligtly darker than the background, and there's no variation in the background. It gives the impression of a map of highways with lots and lots of empty space in between.

    This was driven home to me recently when I wanted to find out where a road went in my area... and couldn't. It's impossible to trace the road with your eyes at a reasonable zoom level, and at the level where the road has labels you're too close to get an idea of the road relative to anything else.

    Choose any town or city and Zoom down looking for streets. Roads in OSM are perfectly readable at reasonable resolutions, and you can even see the difference between different types of areas.

    I don't know how "this makes money" on Google, but maybe somehow it does.

    1. Re:Contrast is excellent by vux984 · · Score: 4, Informative

      One thing i like about google maps vs OSM, is the satellite/aerial imagery. OSM doesn't have it.

      Especially when trying to get to a particular place in a park at the beach, or industrial park or shopping center or condo complex or resort etc... often the maps just show the 'lot'. But nobody has filled in all the little details... the buildings, structures, parking lots, pools, fences, water fountains, flower beds, large rocks, gravel area, tennis courts, whatever.

      Yeah, much of that could be on the map. But its often not, and landmarks like a little grove of trees or a flower bed, or a water fountain, or an exposed rock... the photo just gives more detail.

      Likewise, street-view -- sometimes looking at complex highway connections where there's 4 or 5 highways all meeting; sure the map shows all the exits and ramps and stuff, but its often helpful to see it as an areial photo or street view -- you can see the actual lane markings, dividers, merges, as well as get a better sense of what it's going to look like with the layers of under passes and over passes so you get a better idea of what lane and what rampts you need and what it looks like as you approach. A map... is sometimes just too abstract to be clear enough.

    2. Re:Contrast is excellent by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2

      Both Google maps and the Apple map have two, actually three, majour flaws:
      a) they don't show the scale, which makes it useless to guess a distance
      b) depending on zoom level names of streets or places fade in or fade out and are invisible or to small to read
      c) public transport fades in and out on the map depending on zoom level

      b) and c) are super annoying, because you have e.g. a zoom level where you see a street name or public transport, you zoom in a bit deeper, it vanishes, you zoom even more deep and it shows up again.

      Must be an american thing, not being able to grasp how important public transport in Europe is ...

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  3. privacy is the killer app by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    The main reason I only use OSM and the OSMAND app, is that I don't want my map searches and travelpatterns to become available to third parties.

    None of the competitors can beat OSM on this. Not in functionality (offline maps, search, and navigation), but also not in trust (OSM is a non profit, so there is less incentive to sell or derive data).