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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.
"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.
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.
This sounds like a really neat idea. However, I quit contributing to Wikipedia because of the nonsense that comes with it. It was very frustrating to see the constant edit wars on even semi-controversial content. To say nothing of really controversial pages. Or of the people who think they are "experts" on some topic trying to "correct" people who are actual experts.
Then there is legion of "we must add every detail of everything, no matter how minor" pitted against the legion "everything in Wikipedia must meet some arbitrary high standard of significance." And of course, everyone has to put up with the admins (I won't even get into everything that can go wrong there).
I can't help but think that while this will in the macro sense be a good thing for society and for democratizing information, part of the cost will be that you have to actually investigate the history of every thing that actually matters to you. I can also see how over time it will become increasingly difficult for people who want to make just one or two small contributions when there are others with nothing better to do than to "police" their favorite content full time.
"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.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
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.
The problem open source mapping projects are going to have is funding and resources (especially people) unless they can get one or more big companies with deep pockets to fund such projects. You need satellite map, an army of people to pore over and process them, a huge amount of hardware, a well coordinated team to oversee the whole thing and write the relevant code, and a shit ton of money to make it all happen. Not saying it's impossible but it's going to be very challenging and such a project is already years behind what Google, Apple, and others are already doing. You're talking about a project that rivals the linux kernel or other major software project in complexity but requires a lot more people for data processing and hardware to actually function.
Well, you've just explained why Wikipedia "can't" work ... yet it does.
Not saying that will be true of everything, but clearly it's possible.
Not to mention that OSM has been around for quite awhile, and clearly does "work" fairly well.
You need satellite map
Fortunately they have found companies prepared to donate access to Aerial imagary (afaict actual sattelite imagary is usually too low resoloution to be much use), the two big ones seem to have been Yahoo and Microsoft.
such a project is already years behind what Google, Apple, and others are already doing.
Depends on the area.
In the first world openstreetmap has as you say had to start from a position of trying to catch up. In some areas they have caught up and even overtaken the propietary mappers, in others they are still behind.
OTOH my understanding is that there are places in the world where openstreetmap contributors were the first to produce a map of the streets in the area.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"They"? If you don't live in a democracy, it's "they" and you should probably leave for a place that has it.
If you do live in a democracy, it's "WE", and you should use your vote. All the problems you describe affect your entire neighbourhood. Get organized and all vote.
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!
Flood zones so they....
So....you didn't do any due diligence when buying the house? Or are you now whining about something you accepted when you purchased?
Property maps, so they can apportion taxation to me based on their arbitrary rules
Yes....so arbitrary that they come down to $/sq foot + a factor for number of bedrooms + a factor for features such as an attached garage vs carport.
So incredibly arbitrary that they wrote them down and I can read them if I care to actually understand them!!
Zoning maps, so they can tell me if what I want to have on my property
So...you didn't do any due diligence when buying the house? Or are you now whining about something you accepted when you purchased?
Also, I really want to open a hog rendering plant next to your house and then see what you think about zoning.
And they share these maps as they choose, with little concern for my interests
IF they choose.
They're required to share them if you ask and pay the cost of copying it.
Also, you are upset that they share the maps....except when you are upset they don't share the maps. Makes perfect sense.
I recall back in 1988, I was working for the US Census Bureau doing something they called a "Pre-Census Survey". They had maps with all their blocks configured. These were compiled from a large number of sources. City maps, State Dept of Highway maps, Planning maps, etc, etc. Was about 85% accurate. I was in rural WV and some of the things they listed as roads had not been roads for 100 years. Other areas were where the Dept of Highways had originally planned to re-route roads to, but never actually did it. We spent a lot of time correcting that.
A couple years later, I am in Colorado at CU working with GPS and GIS data. I recalled that the Census Bureau had done a lot of mapping and maybe it was online. And.. yes. It was. Has been online now for over 20 years.
https://www.census.gov/geo/map...
That is, as near as I can determine it's free as I just downloaded my county map with no issues. Pulling it apart, I see the edge info as well as the .shp shapefile.
This usually is the starting point for mapping efforts in the US as near as I can tell. Start with the TIGER data, then add or correct as needed.