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

121–130 of 141 posts

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#121

Post by andygates »

mikekchar wrote: post #105
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 c…

Tht old wiki magic :)

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#122

Post by andygates »

rcthompson wrote: post #103
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.)

Knowing where you are is truly disruptive. Having better maps is just having better maps. GPS has been so incorporated into daily life that we don't appreciate it any more.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#123

Post by maxerickson »

mkhpalm wrote: post #118
ancymon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've backed the statement that OSM contains errors by saying that there are duplicated addresses. I've backed the statement that OSM is inconsistent by saying that sometimes streets in OSM contain full name and sometime only most important part (and that makes Nominatim unable to search for addresses).

I agree, we started looking at OSM's address data sets only to find them pretty sparse. For the areas we investigated I'd estimate around 5% coverage from community efforts. Made me wonder why nobody's done something stupid like grab the files from http://openaddresses.io and create a reasonable starting point? But that got me thinking why even bother with Nominatim vs just throwing all that data into elastic for bet…

Mapzen is pretty much doing what you describe:

https://mapzen.com/blog/the-world-is-yours-announcing-mapzen...

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#124

Post by liotier »

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.

Not quite satisfying search is a known functional gap in the Openstreetmap universe - a few projects are rising to the challenge, such as https://mapzen.com/blog/the-world-is-yours-announcing-mapzen...

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#125

Post by Xylakant »

voltagex_ wrote: post #84
Xylakant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://wheelmap.org/ , a map for wheelchair accessible places builds on OSM.

Well there goes my spare time for the next little while - adding all the places I know of in my home town. It doesn't seem to switch to English properly, though.

It's a known issue and being worked on. Thanks for contributing!

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#126

Post by GFischer »

Splines wrote: post #26
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.

FWIW Google Maps also has an editor which is useful when you need to help other people find you.

Google Maps and editors and other Google maps-related collaboration tools are awful, if you need human interaction.

I entered a location for the company I worked with. The company moved to another location, so I set about to change the address on Google Maps. To verify I was really the owner of the business, they decided to send mail... to the company's old address (which was occupied by a squatter at the point).

End result, now you have two locations for the company, a correct one and an incorrect one.

I also had a dispute when I edited a location on Antarctica (the Uruguayan base)... editors kept reverting the change.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#127

Post by acqq »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #88
Brakenshire wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, a lot of charitable organizations that could be releasing data to build on top of the OSM dataset and the tooling that exists, instead create their own data silos. For instance, Sustrans (the cycling charity in the UK), and the Ramblers (the walking/hiking charity in the UK). I get the impression that managers are coming up with ideas for their digital projects without any reference to the technical landsc…

I can explain at least why OSM data is not used because I have been through the process many times. OSM is frequently rejected for reasons having nothing to do with awareness or quality. The licensing makes it unusable for many analytics applications. There is a de facto prohibition on the blending and derivation using many geo data sets due to licensing restrictions and regulatory requirements, including many govern…

Can you please give some specific examples of the obstacles presented by the OSM license to the projects you mention?

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#128

Post by kragen »

schoen wrote: post #77
XorNot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short answer is yes: OSMand (note, not OSM - but a fairly popular mapping/nav android app using its data) has users who build "full address maps" for entire countries, but it has to be put together as a downloadable bundle and mostly hasn't. The other problem is OSM tends to have good street maps, but very limited door-to-door coverage.

I'm just curious about how this works with some things that seem to add complexity (I haven't worked in this area at all): - Different names for things in different parts of the address because of different languages? (What if two different parts are in different language, e.g. giving a Belgian city name in Flemish but the street name in French? Giving a Swiss address with a street name in French, city name in German…

OSM nominally assigns the "name" tag to the name locally used, and there are also "name:en", "name:fr" tags, etc. Presumably you could search through all of them, using an inverted index and a Bayesian prior for how likely words like "CEP" are to occur in addresses. Bag-of-words should do just about everything except distinguish ZIP codes from street numbers, and possibly distinguish between street and city.

OsmAnd~'s interface for this is absolutely terrible.

A corpus of address searches to test against would be really helpful for this kind of development.

I suspect there is a good book or web site or FAQ about geographic name matching, but you have to be a Googler to see it.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#129

Post by jandrewrogers »

acqq wrote: post #127
jandrewrogers wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can explain at least why OSM data is not used because I have been through the process many times. OSM is frequently rejected for reasons having nothing to do with awareness or quality. The licensing makes it unusable for many analytics applications. There is a de facto prohibition on the blending and derivation using many geo data sets due to licensing restrictions and regulatory requirements, including many govern…

Can you please give some specific examples of the obstacles presented by the OSM license to the projects you mention?

Most interesting products of spatiotemporal analysis that might use OSM data as an input are defined as a derivative database under the OSM database license. The mapping data is enriched and blended with multiple orthogonal data sources (like social media, mobile phone telemetry, remote imaging, etc) to provide a more accurate model of physical world dynamics. I think a big part of the problem is OSM's tacit assumption that the data would only ever be used to make maps. The derived analytical data model is not cartographic in nature, and use cases range from emergency management to consumer behavior.OSM's requirement that the derivative database be publicly and freely available is problematic for several reasons:

- OSM may be a minor input to a petabyte scale derived database, a large percentage of which may be modified every day. Many popular derivations would be technically and economically implausible to make publicly available.

- Jurisdictional restrictions on where the derived database can reside because of the type of data that was used to construct it. Making it available publicly without compliance mechanisms would break the law.

- Regulatory restrictions on the public usage of an input it is blended with, such as PII data like raw mobile network telemetry. Proper compliance mechanisms are often post-derivation and outside the derived database. Again, making the underlying database available without the compliance mechanisms would be breaking the law.

- OSM is the tail wagging the dog for many of these applications. Trying to make the licensing and compliance of complex applications revolve around OSM's requirements is unjustifiable effort. It is the same reason no one adds a little bit of useful GPL code to a million LoC code base even when it would make sense in the abstract.

This is a long-term problem for OSM in that applications are increasingly about getting intelligent answers out of spatial data systems, which implies the above analytical data models, rather than a map that a human is still required to interpret. Commercial cartographic database providers are usually more than happy to write you a license that conforms with the legal and practical requirements of your analytics application.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#130

Post by monknomo »

maxerickson wrote: post #69
monknomo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not being facetious, don't take it the wrong way, but you could fix it. It's surprisingly easy. I fixed a bunch of stuff wrong with my home town and found it pretty gratifying

Prominence is hard to do automatically, so it may not be trivial to get the system that renders the osm.org tiles to prefer Philadelphia (it does things like look at population, but that data is present for Philadelphia).

Very true!

I also took a look at it to figure out why it was showing up that way. They look like they are the same magnitude of thing (city) and they both have population. I'm wondering if it's actually showing Camden county?

Post reply on HN