Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

gisdoctor.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 141 posts

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#101

Post by kuschku »

donquichotte wrote: post #11
privong wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using it in Chile for over a year now and it has been working great. When I arrived, multiple people told me that Google Maps was terrible here, but I have had good luck with OSM.

Yeah, the quality of google maps quickly deteriorates once you leave the highly developed countries. It would be nice to have tighter integration of maps.me with OSM, e.g. to be able to make changes to the maps from the maps.me app. I wanted to remove several abandoned hotels/fuel stations, but in the end just didn't do it because editing OSM is quite tedious.

In my place (and I live in a highly developed country, Germany) Google maps is missing a whole district of my city! Which leads to lots of people ending up in a dead end in a residential street, locking for the highway.

Well, it’s always funny, but with Google’s data not updated since 2005, they’re pretty useless.

It’s like Google only cares about the US.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#103

Post by rcthompson »

ascorbic wrote: post #17

OSM is great of course, but it's a bit of a stretch to say it's more important in geo than GPS.

If I had to pick one or the other, I'd pick OSM. Given a map, I can figure out my location, but the reverse is not true. (Of course, this is ignoring the fact that a lot of OSM data is likely generated using GPS.)

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#104

Post by jpatokal »

skimpycompiler wrote: post #92
jpatokal wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be talking about the HTTP web service Distance Matrix API, but why would you call that from an app? The JavaScript Distance Matrix API scales to essentially unlimited users for free: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/... I'm also not aware of OSM offering anything comparable out of the box, although there are some commercial providers who offers similar paid services based on OSM…

It's a mobile app primarily. OSRM is a nice project - out of the box. The lead went to some giant - so project is currently a bit stray but there are also some other alternatives on github which work well but might not be as mature as OSRM. Google caches insane amounts of things. What one might think is insane algorithms, it's probably just Googles multimillion cluster memory. Google is also lucky that no one needs t…

Assume there are a billion places on Earth. (As there are ~7B people, each of whom lives in a "place", this is already an underestimate.) If it takes a single byte to store the distance between each of these places, you would need an exabyte of storage just for this single byte.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#105

Post by mikekchar »

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.

I was amazed recently. About 3 years ago, my town in Japan had no maps on OSM at all. I set about adding in the routes that I rode on my bicycle, but it was pretty pathetic. I went to the UK for two years and when I came back somebody had finished everything. All the public paths and everything are clearly marked. I think the only thing left is to tag the stores.

The really nice thing about OSM is how easy it is to contribute. There is a famous bicycle route that goes through my town, but it is also famous because it is non-contiguous and completely unmarked on any map. The only way to find it is to ride on the roads and follow the signs (some of which are hand written by residents who live in the area). With OSM it was easy to mark the part of the route that I knew about and now I see a lot of touring cyclists coming through. It's incredibly empowering.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#106

Post by mikekchar »

c0nsumer wrote: post #85
Litost wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still slightly new to editing OSM as a MTBer, maxerickson and c0nsumer have covered the details of how to do this already very well, but i found after comparing a seemingly never ending number of competing apps in this space, i found Viewranger GPS really useful: a) For planning routes in advance to then download to your smartphone and follow using the app (as mentioned elsewhere OSM was definitely the best mappi…

In case you aren't aware, Strava has switched to OSM for its maps which is pretty darn handy. (It's also knowing that all of the local MTB trails that I've surveyed / mapped are now properly on Strava.)

That is amazing! One thing I'm very interested in is the vertical data which Strava seems to be very good at interpolating from GPS traces. Do you know if they contribute that data anywhere?

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#107

Post by maxerickson »

mikekchar wrote: post #106
c0nsumer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you aren't aware, Strava has switched to OSM for its maps which is pretty darn handy. (It's also knowing that all of the local MTB trails that I've surveyed / mapped are now properly on Strava.)

That is amazing! One thing I'm very interested in is the vertical data which Strava seems to be very good at interpolating from GPS traces. Do you know if they contribute that data anywhere?

They pull the elevation data from government data sets:

https://strava.zendesk.com/entries/20965883-Elevation-for-Yo...

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#108

Post by mikekchar »

maxerickson wrote: post #25
reustle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, they've really got Japan covered

OpenAddresses is a separate project from OSM that is aggregating publicly available address data. Japan has a national entity that makes the data available. The sources are all here: https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses

Out of interest, people may not realize that Japan has a very different addressing system than in the west. Streets do no generally have names (though there are a few that do). Instead a city is divided up into areas. I won't try to explain it (for fear of getting it wrong ;-) ): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system

Often foreigners get confused and see things that look like street signs, but which are actually signs for the chome (kind of a big block). They get very confused when they see another such sign on a different street going in a completely different direction :-)

Anyway, Japanese people generally don't put address numbers on their houses. Instead they will put their name. So if you want to find an address for someone you don't know (or a business) it is really hard. For businesses that have to deliver things, it's really important to be able to find the address. So the public database is really useful. These days everybody generally navigates by GPS. You put the address in and the GPS unit will take you to the right place. Most navigation units will even be able to navigate from a land line phone number (as the phone numbers are pre-assigned to the address).

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#109

Post by flippmoke »

hodwik wrote: post #24

I wish it didn't show Philadelphia as Trenton/Camden. That is so incorrect.

https://www.mapbox.com/map-feedback/

Mapbox does a great job of fixing things with out relying on users to do it for OSM! Just drop a pin and type out the problem and Mapbox's data team will likely fix the problem! These changes go right into OSM.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#110

Post by kevinnk »

awqrre wrote: post #66
jdmichal wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your phone is not in airplane mode if it's making any kind of signal. You're just using Wi-Fi with the cellular modem disabled. Since GPS is only reading the satellite signals, it works fine.

Maybe not from a legal standpoint, but you can put your phone in airplane mode and then re-activate Wi-Fi and it will still be in airplane mode... unless they changed the behavior on newer Android OS

I was skeptical so I just attempted this on my Galaxy S5 and it turns out you're right! Very interesting.
Post reply on HN