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OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

blog.emacsen.net

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Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#71

Post by coldtea »

ghaff wrote: post #69
coldtea wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a) biggest company does not equal company with highest market cap Actually it does. Especially since you can have 1 billion in revenue by selling $10 dollar bills at $1 dollar. > b) having the biggest market cap is something thats good for their shareholder, and terrible for anyone else Whatever. > But yeah, do continue to praise your beloved highness. Irrational argument ad hominem.

Well, "biggest" can mean a number of different things but, given that this is an Internet comment board and not an audited financial report, market cap seems one perfectly reasonable measure.

My sentiments exactly.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#72

Post by aw3c2 »

Avamander wrote: post #21
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.

Installing OSMAnd or Maps.me is not hard.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#73

Post by fludlight »

detaro wrote: post #52
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #39

Even Apple the most valuable company in the world with hundreds of billions of dollars of cash on hand is way behind Google in terms of mapping. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ If Apple has trouble keeping feature parity with Google Maps, there is no way that an endeavor like Open Street Maps has any real chance of making something with the breadth, features, and usability of Google Maps.

Goes both ways: Openstreetmap is better for some things already, and I don't see Google catching up to it at them. A big issue is consistency though: OpenStreetMap varies way more in quality between regions, to the point that detailed conversations almost make no sense without disclaimers about where you are talking. OpenStreetMap is a really good map where a strong community exists (either locally or dedicated remot…

> Openstreetmap is better for some things already

Such as?

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#74

Post by post_break »

mtgx wrote: post #59
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #39

Even Apple the most valuable company in the world with hundreds of billions of dollars of cash on hand is way behind Google in terms of mapping. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ If Apple has trouble keeping feature parity with Google Maps, there is no way that an endeavor like Open Street Maps has any real chance of making something with the breadth, features, and usability of Google Maps.

The why doesn't Apple do what other companies and industries typically do in a situation where there is one dominant player? Get everyone else to join a single open solution and then start attacking Google for not being open with its maps. Get Microsoft, Tom Tom, Samsung - everyone else - to work on OSM. Right now, Apple is basically building the "Windows Phone" of map solutions, because it "wants to be different", a…

Because xkcd:927 It will never happen.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#75

Post by maxerickson »

mtgx wrote: post #59
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #39

Even Apple the most valuable company in the world with hundreds of billions of dollars of cash on hand is way behind Google in terms of mapping. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ If Apple has trouble keeping feature parity with Google Maps, there is no way that an endeavor like Open Street Maps has any real chance of making something with the breadth, features, and usability of Google Maps.

The why doesn't Apple do what other companies and industries typically do in a situation where there is one dominant player? Get everyone else to join a single open solution and then start attacking Google for not being open with its maps. Get Microsoft, Tom Tom, Samsung - everyone else - to work on OSM. Right now, Apple is basically building the "Windows Phone" of map solutions, because it "wants to be different", a…

Microsoft and Samsung have both made pretty big investments in OpenStreetMap. Samsung funded Mapzen for a couple years and Microsoft has long provided both permission to use their aerial imagery and the server resources for that to happen.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#76

Post by lucb1e »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #39

Even Apple the most valuable company in the world with hundreds of billions of dollars of cash on hand is way behind Google in terms of mapping. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ If Apple has trouble keeping feature parity with Google Maps, there is no way that an endeavor like Open Street Maps has any real chance of making something with the breadth, features, and usability of Google Maps.

> there is no way that an endeavor like Open Street Maps has any real chance

Before making such an insulting claim to so many volunteers' hard work, get your facts straight. We did it.

In the few countries I have experience with the data (western Europe), the quality is great. It could be more complete on business information, but for the rest (think hiking trails, footpaths, cycling paths, etc.), OSM is more complete in every country I know of.

The data is also more current: when a tunnel nearby here was opened on a Thursday at 8pm, I checked the next weekend to see if someone had mapped it yet. Turns out, at 7am the next morning someone already did it. A few subsequent edits completed the thing. People here care and are jumping on projects like that. Google Maps, the winner (according to you) took a few weeks to get their facts straight. People drove wrong so many times to our place and we keep telling them, just use OSM... Some of our friends do, but not everyone. It's a marketing problem, not a lack of talent or manpower.

I'm honestly not even sure what half this article is about. I'm an active mapper and have yet to discover a single case where it's vandalism beyond doubt of stupidity. I've heard of cases, but never found any. Even stupidity, only in very few cases does it truly mess something up (like like disconnecting roads). I'm guessing OP is not from Europe, and local quality varies on the number of mappers, availability of open data, etc. That it's failing in the USA because it's a completely different world (people seem to think differently, more commercially) doesn't mean the project failed as a whole.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#77

Post by maxerickson »

aspirin wrote: post #38

Im my opinion the biggest problem is the data model (or lack of). Tags i.e. key-value pairs are used to add properties to geometry. Mappers use different combinations of keys/values to describe the same thing. The post touches on this, but does not offer solutions other than adding "layers". There should be a strict schema that would be community managed through some process.

A strict schema won't help when people still use it incorrectly.

Improvement over what exists now would require that the schema be applied strictly and that isn't going to happen with a huge crowdsourced project.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#79

Post by dfox »

piracykills wrote: post #54
Avamander wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seems more like a few hour long hacking session than some serious systemic problem to me.

I would stress the "meaningful" part. I assume that every country in EU gives out CC0 (or so) licensed data for at least geocoding that have the same EU-wide high-level hierarchical format. Problem is that this hierarchy does not map well to OSM tags (which is one instance of problems caused by using tags instead of layers) and often also does not map well to local users' expectations (ie. converting the object names to/from handwritten address is non-trivial problem). Also sometimes the government provided data tends to be stale.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#80

Post by maxerickson »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
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 this a technology issue? Or a funding issue?

It's frequently a licensing issue and then also a resources issue.

There's relatively generalized tools for diffing data against OSM and outputting a change file, but lots of data is released using ambiguous or slightly incompatible licensing.

One example is http://blog.improve-osm.org/en/2018/01/new-features-and-enha...

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