An Open Source Resistance Takes Shape as Tech Giants Race To Map the World (factordaily.com)

Shadma Shaikh, reporting for FactorDaily: Chetan Gowda, 27, was speaking to a room full of students in IIIT Hyderabad for a workshop on OpenStreetMap for beginners organized by Swecha, a non-profit organization to support free software movement last month. There were close to 40 students in the room. Beginners often ask him: Why use open source maps when we already have Google Maps? For Gowda, it was the fact that Google Maps is a global, commercial product and did not capture local detail. Like the old banyan tree that was a major landmark in his hometown Hassan or public benches just outside the town where pedestrians could stop to catch a break or fire catchment areas in Bellandur lake in Bengaluru, India.

"It was fascinating to add little but important details of my town to open maps," says Gowda who was introduced in 2013 to OSM or OpenStreetMap, a global community of mappers formed as a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world in 2004. Since then he has been an active contributor to OpenStreetMap and has conducted many workshops in colleges and institutes to induct more people in the community. Gowda has made 8500 edits in the OpenStreetMap, mainly covering areas in Bengaluru, Hassan and Hyderabad. Gowda and a few other contributors from India are part of a tiny yet growing resistance movement which doesn't want giant corporations to own all the mapping data. For the average consumer, this may not seem like a big deal. But mapping is big business.

The market opportunity for suppliers of mapping to the autonomous car industry is going to be worth over $24 billion by 2050, according to one estimate [PDF]. And that's just one industry. A study commissioned by Google in 2015 estimated that industries that run on top of the Global Positioning Satellite Systems and mapping generate nearly $73 billion in annual revenue. Worldwide, that industry is was estimated to generate $150- $270 billion in revenues. Although new research isn't available, with growing smartphone usage and the birth of companies such as Uber and many others it is safe to assume that the industry has only grown bigger. All the more reason why map data can't be held by only a few companies. With Google Maps beginning to charge small and medium-sized businesses and indie developers more for access to its platform, many have started to explore and switch to open source alternatives of Maps, and commercial services such as Here Maps.

Further reading: What OpenStreetMap Can Be, and Ten Years of Google Maps, From Slashdot to Ground Truth.

Comments

Have anyone actually used it for navigation?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have and albeit being eminently usable, it clearly (and not unexpectedly) lags behind other big players alternatives when it comes to map updates and consistency in general. That detail alone ruins it for end users not engaged with submitting corrections and updates to the maps themselves (I'd say that would be 99,9% of users).

There's a reason Google and others want to charge for maps, and that's because having properly maintained maps is a valuable service. Navigation software can be frustrating with correct maps, imagine using it with maps that aren't current: all the value of modern GPS navigation is suddenly lost and you are back to reading street signs and paper maps.

Re:Have anyone actually used it for navigation?

[vtcodger]

"There's a reason Google and others want to charge for maps, and that's because having properly maintained maps is a valuable service."

And one that involves significant costs if it isn't produced by volunteer labor. Realistically, for commercial products, either someone is going to be charged money for the map or the maps are going to come with ads, or both.

Re:Have anyone actually used it for navigation?

[rickb928]

"Perhaps the government for a certain location or country taxes their people a small fee, say $1/yr to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of their data sets. "

That's called a tax, and already pay that, perhaps more.

Where I live, in the USA, municipalities maintain maps for a variety of reasons:

Flood zones so they can bill me an additional 50% on homeowner insurance because I live in a 100-year flood zone, because they designed the drainage that way, intentionally, because they just decided back in 1980, and they expected me to pay for it some day, somehow, and of course so that my flood insurance will pay for the failed commercial insurance in actual, regular, dangerous hurricane country.

Property maps, so they can apportion taxation to me based on their arbitrary rules, and apply the same rules as they choose to others.

Zoning maps, so they can tell me if what I want to have on my property is permissible according to their standards, derived from professional planners and fellow citizens that believe their desires are sufficiently compelling to be made law.

And others. And they share these maps as they choose, with little concern for my interests, and sometimes for a fee. IF they choose.

Good for navigation

[Kludge]

I use OSMand, which is an Android app that uses Open Street Map. It works pretty well for navigation.

The best part is, unlike Google Maps, I can preload the entire maps onto my phone, like an actual GPS device, so I do not need a data connection to navigate.
Also great is the Wikipedia feature, which automatically pre-downloads Wikipedia articles related to points of interest. On vacation I can walk/drive around, click on interesting things on the map, read the Wikipedia article, and appear amazingly educated, without a data connection. It started to drive my family nuts in Athens as I described the historical significance of everything.

Re:So, it will be like Wikipedia for maps?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been an active contributor to OSM now for about 1.5 years. I started these edits since neither Google Maps nor local public transit route planner recognized my home address, which resided on a "road" on top of a shopping mall, not connected to the actual road network. My edits concentrate mostly on my neighborhood which tends to be under constant flux due to massive construction sites, but also extends to the general capital area of a small European country. Amount of edits on this area hovers around couple dozen a day. Of these, maybe once a month I see an edit which might be considered somehow antisocial or unprofessional in nature, and usually they're corrected quite quickly.

I think it works out quite well at least on my region. OSM has a stance to accept as much information as possible as long as it has general usefulness and it's factually correct (and not opinion-based, which shouldn't be that hard on maps!). Removing such information is not welcome; the product of OSM is data, not a specific visualization of it.

Sometimes it *does* feel that too much is too much. Marking up every shop, every path, every tree and every traffic sign can be fine on most occassions, but I happen to live on a spot which way too many publicly traversable layers; there's a subway station, an underground logicstics hub, five levels of underground parking space, an underground bus station, one level of underground shopping mall, an underground street, a partially street-accessible, partially underground shopping mall level which extends to neighboring buildings, three over-the-ground shopping mall levels and a pedestrian path on top of the underground street, a jogging path with planting around it on top of the shopping mall, running partially under residential buildings which reside on top of two HPAC floors which also host a private plaza on top of them. There are public pedestrian paths of importance at least on half a dozen layers, streets on almost equal amount, and often they run on top of each other. What is the preferred detail to map all this?

I have chosen to map as much as helps pedestrian, car and public transit, but leave rest of the details out for now. Map in such an environment becomes quickly so stuffed that a typical map user can't understand anything on it without a navigator interface. Why a shopping mall appears to have lawns inside grocery stores? What all these criss-crossing pedestrian paths mean? (It's typically not obvious that they're on different levels, but they are needed to provide public transit accurate and efficient walking plans.) I would actually want to stuff a lot more information on the map and nobody is really preventing me from doing it, but rendering would simply turn illegible if I did so. Thankfully for 99.9% of environments this isn't a real problem.

Maps have always been inherently public property

[rbrander]

I don't mean that a privately-made map is inherently public, of course, just that almost the only people who found it worthwhile to map were governments. Better put would be "inherently of low value, but to large numbers of people so that cheap access for everybody was the only way to pay for it".

A map has huge value when you need to find someplace new, but the huge majority of travel is to already-known locations. Cab drivers are an exception, but consider London, where "The Knowledge" required for cab drivers, is a memorized map learned on the job.

So there are very few indeed private companies mapping - the paper maps of your town for decades were just purchased data from the city government, sold for a tiny fraction of what it cost the city to make, because the city had to map every pipe and street anyway to maintain them. Indeed, to know where the heck the property lots were. (Land titles are generally a higher level of government, but where I worked, the Province had an agreement with the City to let the City map all lots inside its borders and provide that to Provincial Land Titles).

Google changed that with their cool car-with-8-cameras mapping, but generally also buys the City data because it's sold so cheaply - and is maintained every year, whereas you can see on the Google maps that the photos are only refreshed after multiple years.

For non-commercial use, City data is mostly free these days - "open data" initiatives became common years ago and they post up files in ESRI's "shape file" format (ESRI is the Microsoft of GIS, their formats are like MS office formats). There are also free standards like "KML" files.

Bottom line, there is no reason to let any private companies take over this space. The government mapping efforts have not ceased; the "value added" from information about business and services is *easily* exceeded by the OSM editing described here: people who live there will always have an advantage at highlighting local interests. (Also, the value of a location depends on who likes it, not "who pays google" to flag it.) The streetview is one of those features that's more cool than actually useful.

OSM is available for your phone, by the way, and works almost identically to google: uses your GPS to just show the map around you. Give it a try!