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OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

blog.emacsen.net

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Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#121

Post by lucb1e »

sampo wrote: post #116
lucb1e wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm the DRI All I can find is "Dietary Reference Intake" on https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/DRI -- what do you mean? (I agree with most of your post by the way (except for the bit about it being art, which would mean it has no function except to be art), I'm just unclear on what you meant here.)

> All I can find is "Dietary Reference Intake" Not useful in this case, but acronymfinder.com gives 60 possible meanings. Also the intented meaning as 54th down the list. https://www.acronymfinder.com/DRI.html

Yeah that's why I don't go for those websites, there are hundreds of meanings for each TLA and you'll rarely know which one was meant (both because you don't feel like scrolling through that many, and because more than one usually fits). I made that mistake once or twice before.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#122

Post by iamdave »

pbowyer wrote: post #108
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…

> Probably right: OSM needs layers, or even a more sweeping re-architecture to allow better versioning, moderation, better tooling, and easier understanding of the data. I have a hobby site about railways [0] I'm picking up again after a decade of inactivity. I wanted to display a route map of each railway, with clickable stations and the route highlighted. I can not work out how to do that. OSM has the route and sta…

The type of data you want for routes is probably in KMZ format. I took a few minutes looking around openrailwaymap and their wiki but nothing immediately obvious stood out.

https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/railroad-kmz

A brief google search came back with this; I haven't inspected the data or even tried to use it to see what it contains, but the page description indicates it may not be exact routes you are looking for-but it's a start. Implementing the data is a bit more work in order to display route maps, something like the previously mentioned MapBox does this very interactively.

My email address is in the profile, feel free to shoot over an email if you'd like some help with it. Depending on the complexity, I can probably devote a few cycles this weekend to show you a one-off map with railway routes, and show you how it's done.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#123

Post by bluGill »

fludlight wrote: post #73
detaro wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Getting to my house. I got tired of people ending with a "you have arrived" more than a mile from my house so I went to open street maps and fixed it. (the automatically imported data for my street had the street name wrong - I'm guessing google imported the same data instead of actually driving the back road). While I was at it marked a few of the roads as requiring 4 wheel drive (legal roads, but only used by farmers going to the fields along it), thus preventing people from getting directed to a road they can't drive on.

I checked the "I consider my work public domain" box, 6 months latter google started giving better directions around my neighborhood. I doubt this is coincidence. However the ability to fix directions to your personal house is something OSM does better than google today.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#124

Post by zbentley »

reaperducer wrote: post #46
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 of making something with the breadth, features, and usability of Google Maps But does it need to? Isn't there a market for basic mapping, without all the needless feature bloat? I'd rather a mapping service concentrate on getting roads right, and not whether there is a Howard Johnson's nearby.

Most people are using those roads to get to somewhere, be it a HoJo or a street address. So the geotagging ability is very, very important. I suspect a map system with vastly superior routing information (just roads and coordinates) and slightly inferior geotagging would still lose to one with the opposite balance.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#125

Post by lucb1e »

aspirin wrote: post #114
lucb1e wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what, tag proposals where people vote yay or nay? We have those. As an active mapper, I very rarely find two ways of tagging the same thing, so the process seems to work fine. And if you do find a situation where there are multiple options, it takes only a quick check on taginfo to find the more commonly used one. If you go with that, it should converge soon.

Currently there is nothing to stop mappers using tags in wrong ways. It should just be flat out impossible. If a field/tag isn't defined in the schema, it could not be used. The range of values should be limited in the same way, too.

Ah, I see where you're going with this. It would slow innovation down to a trickle, though. Anyone who wants to do something that's not yet standardized would have to stash their edits somewhere and wait for official approval. And that would likely take weeks or months at best. Currently, the best idea wins automatically because good ideas are used by both mapping applications and mappers.

Maybe something in the middle, like the current wiki system but with an enforcement rule of whatever is on the wiki. Anyone could freely edit it because it's a wiki (adding allowed options, and removing/changing any that have extremely few uses (zero, or perhaps a few which are then removed)), but at least there is a correct spec.

If people really had to adhere to a strict, slow-moving standard with pre-approval, the spec would also become extremely complex and very difficult to implement, because the spec-makers will want to think of every eventuality. See any other large specification ever, like HTML or something. I can't see that ending well. I think a hybrid system might be better than a strict one, given the choice between those two.

I like thinking about it though! Always good to have hear ideas.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#126

Post by crooked-v »

juliendorra wrote: post #118
btilly wrote: post #106

Here is my experience. I work for a company that syndicates location data for businesses. We had a couple of businesses that wanted to syndicate to OSM. It. Was. A. Nightmare. We have addresses for every store. We don't know where the building is. Any store we place is going to be easy to place on a street near the building. If you've not placed it inside of the strip mall on the right spot, other people delete it. A…

Are you complaining that OSM contributors rejected wrong or imprecise location data about your client’s stores? If you are, I would like you to also consider this from the point of view of (maybe volunteer) contributors who prefer less data but correct data in OSM. Maybe draw a parallel with Wikipedia where a page that is not up to the standards might be deleted. (Not a contributor to OSM myself, but I have helped th…

The broader point is that there's a structural issue here, as there's no ability to link data to addresses in a form that doesn't require literally knowing the location of a store within a building ahead of time.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#127

Post by juliendorra »

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.

Anecdotal, but still: In Paris, new streets had been created in the 13th district. One was an important administrative destination for Parisians (building permits admin), allée Claude Levi-Strauss.

OSM had the street in its database from the start.

It took Google Maps more than a year (?) to catch up, and consequently in 2015 for example an Uber driver at the time would try and drive you to the opposite side of Paris where a museum had a garden of the same name… not good when you had an appointment with an official there :-)

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#128

Post by bluGill »

aspirin wrote: post #114
lucb1e wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what, tag proposals where people vote yay or nay? We have those. As an active mapper, I very rarely find two ways of tagging the same thing, so the process seems to work fine. And if you do find a situation where there are multiple options, it takes only a quick check on taginfo to find the more commonly used one. If you go with that, it should converge soon.

Currently there is nothing to stop mappers using tags in wrong ways. It should just be flat out impossible. If a field/tag isn't defined in the schema, it could not be used. The range of values should be limited in the same way, too.

Which is great only if you have all the right tags. A grain bin is not a silo - to a farmer this is an important distinction - the rest of the world cannot tell the difference, both are round towers.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#129

Post by nxc18 »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #29
emacsen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 expe…

Tesla is a MapBox customer.

https://electrek.co/2017/07/03/tesla-map-navigation-open-sou...

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#130

Post by btilly »

juliendorra wrote: post #118
btilly wrote: post #106

Here is my experience. I work for a company that syndicates location data for businesses. We had a couple of businesses that wanted to syndicate to OSM. It. Was. A. Nightmare. We have addresses for every store. We don't know where the building is. Any store we place is going to be easy to place on a street near the building. If you've not placed it inside of the strip mall on the right spot, other people delete it. A…

Are you complaining that OSM contributors rejected wrong or imprecise location data about your client’s stores? If you are, I would like you to also consider this from the point of view of (maybe volunteer) contributors who prefer less data but correct data in OSM. Maybe draw a parallel with Wikipedia where a page that is not up to the standards might be deleted. (Not a contributor to OSM myself, but I have helped th…

No. I am stating that OSM has no setup for, or desire to, accept useful but incomplete data. And unless they do, they will not have data available that other services have.

I know where Google, Bing, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, etc get phone numbers and current business hours for our clients. They are straightforward for us to work with, and we are happy to give it to them. OSM is not easy to work with us, so don't get that data.

OSM has a choice. Be easy to work with, or have limited data. OSM has chosen to be hard to work with. That is a valid choice, but then you have to live with the result.

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