Thank you for your contributions and writing this. Just spent a week of development time 'fixing' Nomination reverse geo-code issues and creating a pay for RGC backup because we exceeded the 1per sec max and had NO idea when it would turn back on. To boot, no help whatsoever determining why when we used it successfully for over a year. All of a sudden NOPE, we're cut off with foggy reasoning and no explanation of why or when we'll be back up. I've spent several months on maps. All of them. I know them through and through. I could sleep speak API docs and pricing for mapping services. We need OSM. OSM needs many of these 'fixes'. ASAP. No idea who was running things there. You gotta work on your analogies ;), but yeah if a user doesn't know how much the total usage is and can only use a percentage of that unknown total, it's ridiculous. Let's get a premium account going at resonable rates. Same for reverse geocode. No more than a 1ps max. Ok so what if we have a surge. Error 3. Give me a break. And so brashly the docs state this almost warning deterring any user from ever wanting to integrate because there is a big ol' flag saying 'we DO NOT want to scale with you!' At a bare minimum how about you average per second rates over a 10min aggregate. Soooo much room for overhaul and improvement here. This is a big start. Number one on HN! Let's fix/upgrade the antiquated OSM tech, logic and direction. It's a new world and the world needs OSM.
OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
201–210 of 290 posts
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in this case his criticism is merited. There is plenty of open data for street addresses available, and almost certainly already in osm. Instead of linking the most basic form of physical site identification -- which is basically a legal data set maintained by governments -- to their data import functionality/process, they just refuse data. Sounds off to me.
Plenty of governments restrict use of their address data. Address coverage in OSM in general isn't great. There are regions that are good and then regions where there basically aren't addresses.
I am certainly not an expert on international data access regulations. But at the same time, there is more than enough of that information publicly available to make it a basic first step in a mapping application/dataset.
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#203This 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…
Test
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Market cap would be a reasonable measure for "biggest public company". It's an awful measure for "biggest company", since private companies have no market cap. This was discussed a while ago in relation to Saudi Aramco's potential partial IPO. Saudi Aramco is huge, much bigger than Apple, with no market cap.
> private companies have no market cap They absolutely do. They're just updated less frequently and called "valuations". Closely-held private companies also have valuations, they're just even less frequently made visible.
Its technically not "market cap" since there are no stocks and no public offerings, and therefore no "bet" on their future. A valuation and market cap are entirely different things.
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 complet…
I agree that OSM is great for roads and on the whole at least as complete and up to date as gmaps. However when it comes to buildings and landmarks it's way behind in my experience (at least in Sweden). Having roads is great, but it would be nice if it also had my destination.
For me in Sweden that relly depends on where in the contry we are, most maps (except OSM) have imported a registry of companies (PRV or Skatteverket) that keeps the address for most small companies as the owners home address. So the restaurang shows up in a village a few miles away from it's actual location. This made gmaps and foursquare useless for finding the destination. For me OSM is better of having this right, but the Nomatrim search still makes one unable to find it :D
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> private companies have no market cap They absolutely do. They're just updated less frequently and called "valuations". Closely-held private companies also have valuations, they're just even less frequently made visible.
Its technically not "market cap" since there are no stocks and no public offerings, and therefore no "bet" on their future. A valuation and market cap are entirely different things.
> A valuation and market cap are entirely different things
In the way the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales "are entirely different things." Both "valuation" and "market cap" are measures on the aggregated estimated present value of future cash flows, i.e. net asset value, from/of a security.
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
can't there be an open source set of service APIs that's self hosted OSM does have open source self-hosted options. Unfortunately, the developer experience is much more painful than using Google Maps. With Google Maps, if you can add Javascript to a web page you're basically good to go. Data updates, software updates, server redundancy, server support and security, all taken care of. Even if you're exclusively a fron…
Is it something that could be containerized? Maybe not as simple as a JS embed, but deploying a self hosted docker container is far easier than installing most things I've encountered.
With vector tiles one doesn't have to containerize anything - just shard them onto a bunch of servers and server them over https. Put an accelerator/cache in front and proxy to the desired region backend.
With image tiles it's a hurdle. You have to build 18 zoom levels of tiles. The most detailed layers have an astronomic number if tiles. You also need a huge amount if storage.
http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox...
Did I mention the data being huge? What's the point of having 15Tb container, which takes forever to deploy? You can certainly containerize the services, but there's no benefit containerizing the data, since you have to replace it all at once rather than synchronizing the differences.
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#208This 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 wrong: Expanding the scope of OpenStreetMap to include transient data. Too much other work to do, maybe later for this. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the whole domain, but if OSM would get layers, that would lead to better composability, then wouldn't the question of transient/frivolous data kinda become moot? The way I see it, in that scenario I could make and host my own whatever pokemon layer and OSM prope…
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your goal, but how could this not be achieved with a separate database, and overlay your pokemon on-top of the OSM map?
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, I realize hosting a service is expensive, but can't there be an open source set of service APIs that's self hosted? That way you can chose to get a full copy of the data (and be responsible for pulling updates) and the API, or just pay someone else for access to their hosted version of the API?
> you can chose to get a full copy of the data (and be responsible for pulling updates) Even if you could make the general setup and maintenance incredibly easy somehow, just syncing the map data from osm regularly would require decent hardware: the extra cost of each dev doing this themselves just doesn't compare to using a central tile host. On top of that, if every dev was regularly updating their own OSM data, OS…
> just syncing the map data from osm regularly would require decent hardware
We need servers with at least 24 CPU threads and 256 GB RAM and moving the data into PostGIS, region by region takes a week or two. Plus you manually have to fix the process when it just spits out an error and aborts after 15 hours of churning.
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
What qualifies as useful but incomplete data is relative (and to a degree -- a matter of opinion). If am told "there is a big mountain here, give-or-take 1 km" that's probably useful. But if I'm told "there is a water fountain here give-or-take 1 km" that is pretty darn useless.
Your data is probably not near as bad as that, but if you put a POI on a map, and somebody goes there, but doesn't find it because its a couple hundred metres away, they're going to assume that it moved/went out of business (and remove the data).
I can think of two ways around this. One is to make a note about the incomplete data you have and hope that somebody finds the actual location and adds it. The second is to go-ahead and add the thing with a "fixme" tag saying "location approximate" or something. I've seen both techniques used in the past.