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OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

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Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#51

Post by knz »

electricblue wrote: post #37
jerknextdoor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to learn the world of GIS for a cycling/pedestrian project I've been working on over the last few months. I'm also working with the local Open Data/Open Government groups. As I've gotten to know the communities I've seen this over and over...even in the Open Data groups. I've come to the conclusion that it's not malicious (or even 'Not Invented Here' syndrome), but ignorance and a complete misunderst…

GIS Manager here. The reason silos happen in the GIS world is because of trust. Every organization has different priorities and standards when it comes to data. The accuracy you need for your building footprints might be (and probably is) unusable for someone else. Data sharing between entities is common but even then oftentimes a great deal of finesse is needed to make another organization's data work in your datase…

Another challenge has been that GIS data is historically expensive to acquire. As consumer grade spatial applications have become more popular there has been a noticeable shift to release data for the common good rather than trying to recover the cost of acquisition. Of course there are still plenty of silos out there. The push towards regional datasets for public infrastructure also seems to be gaining momentum but these projects often go nowhere unless they are mandated by a Federal or State agency.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#52

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

ancymon wrote: post #48

From programmer's point of view working with OSM is quite annoying. OSM is being considered more as database than drawn map. But that database is inconsistent, contains many errors and its data structures are not good to represent non geographical items. On top of that mechanical edits of map are very discouraged. I think that OSM would only be good for simple stuff like showing on your website where's your business…

Not at all. Plenty of people, myself included, route with OSM data.

Address searches are possible though, as ever, it depends whether contributors have added those addresses to OSM.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#53

Post by yellowbkpk »

ancymon wrote: post #48

From programmer's point of view working with OSM is quite annoying. OSM is being considered more as database than drawn map. But that database is inconsistent, contains many errors and its data structures are not good to represent non geographical items. On top of that mechanical edits of map are very discouraged. I think that OSM would only be good for simple stuff like showing on your website where's your business…

I think you'll find that there are plenty of companies making lots of money selling services on top of OSM's "inconsistent" data. Mapbox sells an extremely powerful map styling system, geocoding/searching, and routing. Mapzen sells similar services. MapQuest offers services using OSM data. Apple Maps uses OSM data in areas where commercial data isn't available.

I think you'll find that OSM is great for more than just simple stuff. In fact using and contributing to it is a million dollar industry.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#54

Post by maxxxxx »

The only drawback I see with OSM that none of the apps I have tried has good search capability. I would like to be able to enter "11077 Wilshire, Los Angeles", instead I have to click through state. city and then street which is tedious and sometimes impossible.

The maps themselves are very good.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#55

Post by skimpycompiler »

lnanek2 wrote: post #29
corndoge wrote: post #23

I'm developing a transit mapping application for Android. OpenStreetMap in place of the standard Google Maps components has been far easier, much more hackable, more flexible, and overall much more fun to work with than Google's MapView. As an added bonus the libraries for Android (OSMDroid in particular) have total interop with the Google Maps API. It really has been a pleasure to dev against. I think OSM is an acco…

Android developer here as well. Have found the same. It has saved the day before where the only other option would have been licensing commercial options like skobbler. I don't think Google actually dog foods their Android Google Maps API, so it tends to be pretty limited.

Google Maps is just too expensive and its pricing model isn't exponential at all, it's not even quadratic.

Very common operation is looking for pairwise distance matrix. Pricing and limits are totally irrational.

100,000 daily limit is totally impossible for an app with 10 users. 100x100 = 10,000 :D

Given that Google probably has all of the distances cached somewhere on their servers, I see no technical reason why this limit can't easily be increased. My app can have millions of shortest paths requests per day, and I certainly do not have Google's infrastructure.

I get incomparable functionality using OSM.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#56

Post by amdavidson »

c0nsumer wrote: post #5

I do a lot of mountain bike trail mapping work using OpenStreetMap, and it's really bugged me that more public-service mapping projects (eg: MTB Project) don't build on OSM. They all tend to instead build their own mapping set which requires stuff to be re-entered... It's kind of a pain.

How are you finding is the easiest way to do this? I would love to be able to add more trail information.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#57

Post by schoen »

maxxxxx wrote: post #54

The only drawback I see with OSM that none of the apps I have tried has good search capability. I would like to be able to enter "11077 Wilshire, Los Angeles", instead I have to click through state. city and then street which is tedious and sometimes impossible. The maps themselves are very good.

What kind of work has been done publicly on a data model for resolving this kind of query? I was just wondering about that because I was noticing a little of how Google Maps responds in terms of different language names for places and features.

Could this model be built automatically from existing OSM data, or would someone else have to manually add some kind of additional hierarchy information? Has this been studied from the computational linguistics side as well as the geospatial information side?

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#58

Post by ancymon »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #52
ancymon wrote: post #48

From programmer's point of view working with OSM is quite annoying. OSM is being considered more as database than drawn map. But that database is inconsistent, contains many errors and its data structures are not good to represent non geographical items. On top of that mechanical edits of map are very discouraged. I think that OSM would only be good for simple stuff like showing on your website where's your business…

Not at all. Plenty of people, myself included, route with OSM data. Address searches are possible though, as ever, it depends whether contributors have added those addresses to OSM.

The flag OSM geocoder is Nominatim. It turns out it won't work if you provide only part of street name (if OSM contains full street name) or when you provide full name (if OSM contains only part of the name) [1]. So in my opinion searching for addresses is not reliable.

That's one thing, another is that addresses are quite often duplicated. There's no automatic check for that and such duplicates exist for years.

[1] - https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/45825/how-can-i-geo...

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#60

Post by rz2k »

donquichotte wrote: post #3

When I was traveling overland in central Asia, everybody I met was using maps.me with OSM. The maps were of surprisingly good quality and maps.me is superb, allowing the maps for whole countries to be downloaded (ideal if you don't have a data plan) and the route calculation is quick as long as the road grid isn't too dense.

That looks pretty good, but I don't understand why I can't restrict location services to when the app is in the foreground.
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