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OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

blog.emacsen.net

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Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#21

Post by Avamander »

acabal wrote: post #15

I remember just a few years ago, I got a new phone and was interested in replacing as many Google apps with OSS maps that I could. (K9 instead of Google's mail app, etc.) Naturally I turned to OSM instead of Google Maps. But I was really surprised by how strange and difficult it was to install and use. As the author mentioned, OSM itself doesn't have any apps, which is very confusing. After some research I figured ou…

I just hate how hard it is to get a simple vector map based on OSM, after that it's really fine to use.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#22

Post by emacsen »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #18

This post seems half right, half wrong. Wrong that OSM should be a service provider and not a database - I think it should be a database, and corporations are good for OSM. The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox. It's insanely expensive to be Mapbox, and Mapzen just failed trying to be a less corporate version of Mapbox. And then the usage policy part of the article is moot or at least not that consequen…

> The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox

The problem is that most companies using OSM are using Mapbox. This leads to a few problems, including attribution, which I decided not to touch on, but is a serious problem that Mapbox doesn't address sufficiently.

If they could use OSM directly, they'd be engaged with OSM directly. They'd care about OSM. Right now OSM shoves these users away and makes them into customers of some third party (maybe Mapbox, maybe someone else) instead of caring about OSM itself.

> Expanding the scope of OpenStreetMap to include transient data. Too much other work to do, maybe later for this.

How about letting users experiment and seeing what cool stuff they can come up with?

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#23

Post by jedberg »

striking wrote: post #20
acabal wrote: post #15

I remember just a few years ago, I got a new phone and was interested in replacing as many Google apps with OSS maps that I could. (K9 instead of Google's mail app, etc.) Naturally I turned to OSM instead of Google Maps. But I was really surprised by how strange and difficult it was to install and use. As the author mentioned, OSM itself doesn't have any apps, which is very confusing. After some research I figured ou…

Maps.me is pretty killer, though. The only issue I see with OSM is lack of traffic data. Generally when I drive with Google Maps, I already know the route but want Google to step in when there's traffic.

> Generally when I drive with Google Maps, I already know the route but want Google to step in when there's traffic.

You should try Waze. I too mostly use Google to route me around traffic, but Waze is an order of magnitude better at it. It has more frequently updated traffic data and is willing to take you on side streets.

For example the other day I was driving down a major road, and Google said to just stay on it, but Waze took me down a side street for two blocks and then back to the main road, saving me four minutes, which was 25% of the total trip time.

Also, when making a long drive, Google chooses a route that is optimal right now for the entire route. Waze accounts for the fact that it will be an hour later when you get to the second half of your trip, and uses that to make better choices.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#24

Post by spectre256 »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #7
emacsen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting question of how much flexibility you give people at the beginning vs as a project matures, but I'm looking at the situation with OSM pragmatically, that is to say "What OSM needs to do now", rather than "What they should have done". The problem of both bad edits and vandalism are very large (much like Google Mapmaker) and other measures we've put in place, such as changeset comments (which I helpe…

What about some kind of automated approach to validation? A major difference between OSM data and something like wikipedia is that, unlike wikipedia, at least some of the OSM data verifiable. A street somewhere, does exist, in a particular spot. There must be some way to croudsource validation.

Ultimately it comes down to the resources to create such a thing, right? There have been some successes with crowdsourced validations such as Facebook's translation efforts (although I think in that case it was merely a component of the process). And it would rely on a volume of edits that OSM may not have. There may be 1000 people ready to verify the location of the Statue of Liberty, but probably not the location of every building in a remote area being mapped for HOT.

Mapbox has built the start of a validation framework, and they have done very cool stuff. Of course then they get criticized for "forking" OSM. There are definitely valid criticisms there, but it seems like there's no way to win.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#25

Post by jimmyrocks »

Thanks for posting this here! I feel like this is mostly good constructive criticism.

I have given a few talks about using OSM data in the US government and it comes down to authoritative data sources and validation. It's a great starting point, but there needs to be another layer (or two) of validation before it can be used at the enterprise level. The National Map Corps has some good examples of how this can be implemented with data stewardship.

I am also working on a few projects to take public domain data and put it into OSM. While it's useful and mostly open, it's definitely less open than the original data sources. Another issues is that as soon as someone edits the imported data, it will become less authoritative as well.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#26

Post by Avamander »

piracykills wrote: post #13
emacsen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a hard post to make. OSM was a big part of my life for many years, and I have friends in the project. I like my friends (even the ones I disagree with). But where OSM has failed most in my view (and maybe I need to add this to the article) is that there are now free geographic datasets from local governments and without the ability to integrate them into OSM easily, and then update them (which we basically c…

Is OSM not doing this? I swear I've seen them importing and updating street level address data in my city - it directly referenced some city GIS server. Maybe not officially, but someone must be running scripts that do this?

Somebody might be doing that for their area but for example I haven't seen that happen in Estonia where the government provides absolutely excellent data but there's no easy and meaningful way getting that data into OSM

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#27

Post by jedberg »

Open maps used to be the job of the USGS. They stopped doing it because of Google.

I was touring the USGS in Palo Alto about 10 years ago, and the librarian there was lamenting the existence of Google. He said that while it was nice that Google was doing all this work, it was causing the USGS to stop doing it, since they could get the data from Google.

He predicted that the USGS would get severely cut in their funding for mapping activities because of it, and he was right. He was worried that all the best data would be locked up in Google's servers, and he was right about that too.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#28

Post by Avamander »

duozerk wrote: post #16

OSM gives people the tools to create their own map rather than offering them a simple, out of the box solution On this point and the main part of the first argument, I kinda disagree; the OSM project should specifically aim to do that: providing means for one to create a service. However, providing an actual map service would cost much, much more in bandwidth and I doubt a free software project like this has that kin…

Time to move away from awful raster maps and to vector maps?

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#29

Post by andrewljohnson »

emacsen wrote: post #22
andrewljohnson wrote: post #18

This post seems half right, half wrong. Wrong that OSM should be a service provider and not a database - I think it should be a database, and corporations are good for OSM. The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox. It's insanely expensive to be Mapbox, and Mapzen just failed trying to be a less corporate version of Mapbox. And then the usage policy part of the article is moot or at least not that consequen…

> The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox The problem is that most companies using OSM are using Mapbox. This leads to a few problems, including attribution, which I decided not to touch on, but is a serious problem that Mapbox doesn't address sufficiently. If they could use OSM directly, they'd be engaged with OSM directly. They'd care about OSM. Right now OSM shoves these users away and makes them into…

> The problem is that most companies using OSM are using Mapbox.

Is that even true? And is number of companies even a good metric? Based on revenue/market cap, the bulk of companies use OSM directly.

The world's biggest company (Apple) uses OSM directly. Telenav uses it directly. Don't Tesla and Uber use OSM directly too? And we use Mapbox at Gaia GPS, but we also use OSM data directly.

> How about letting users experiment and seeing what cool stuff they can come up with?

In my experience building a company, if you focus on too many things, you get everything wrong. This smells to me of being not on target for making OSM as strong as possible, even though it has alluring upside.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#30

Post by bonzini »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #5

I've found that in terms of supporting any kind of additional analysis, OSM data to be unreliable to the point of uselessness, which isn't to say there is a better alternative. I think this quote from your article: "One of the most significant technical problems with OSM is the lack of a review model, that is for a change to the map to be staged and then reviewed before being applied. Not having this functionality ca…

As an occasional OSM editor, I wouldn't really feel good about moderation. My edits are limited basically to my home town (10.000 inhabitants, about 10 sq km) where I am adding unmapped roads (usually agricultural, sometimes new construction) that I "discover" while running. I started doing that simply because Runkeeper's website uses OSM and it was showing me running in the middle of nowhere, while there was actually a small road leading to my grandfather's place. (And FWIW Google doesn't have agricultural roads at all, which kinda sucks for running even slightly out of the beaten path).

My edits are probably not perfect, but while somebody cared about mapping the town in the first place, it was out of date enough that probably nobody would bother to approve or perfect my changes. Having them rejected would probably have caused me to stop contributing too.

What kinds of issues and vandalisms did you experience?

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