Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

blog.emacsen.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 290 posts

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#211

Post by petre »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #98
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…

> Imports need to be supported. I don't really agree. I have seen so many wrong imports and I have seen imports demotivating individual mappers. With a good data source an import can be a good start, but it's not a silver bullet. I agree to your other items, though.

We wanted to contribute forest data on Africa back in 2015. It wasn't possible. We'd have to add it via JOSM or the web based editor. So we gave up since it was a no go. Now we just discard the OSM forest data and add our own when updating the map data.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#212

Post by voltagex_ »

petre wrote: post #207
chuckdries wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=ge…

How intensive is it to rasterise on demand?

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#213

Post by voltagex_ »

iamdave wrote: post #122
pbowyer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

Is KMZ really still the best way to go?

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#214

Post by petre »

PeterisP wrote: post #164
miah_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waze is pretty great but it has a habit of running you through hospital parking lots to save 2 minutes or turning multiple times to avoid a intersection that isn't really that busy. What I wish Waze would do is have a mode that allowed me to learn a route. Maps, and Waze both 'optimize' so much that its sometimes hard to learn a route from point a -> b because every time you go it sends you on different paths. Many o…

I feel that Waze quite literally reflects the community - i.e. it's not that Waze is trying to shave off seconds by some sort of math analysis of possible routes, but rather that it's showing a shortcut that quite a few people actually are using and that's working for them. Google might route me through a turn that's theoretically allowed according to street signs but takes forever to make in heavy traffic; Waze migh…

If it knows routes used by locals, that means your positioning data is always sent back to Waze, meaning Google.

I'm using Here for longer trips. Google has the habbit of making questionable routing decisions. We ended up on roads that looked like after bombardment using it.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#215

Post by alexchamberlain »

petre wrote: post #211
johannes1234321 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imports need to be supported. I don't really agree. I have seen so many wrong imports and I have seen imports demotivating individual mappers. With a good data source an import can be a good start, but it's not a silver bullet. I agree to your other items, though.

We wanted to contribute forest data on Africa back in 2015. It wasn't possible. We'd have to add it via JOSM or the web based editor. So we gave up since it was a no go. Now we just discard the OSM forest data and add our own when updating the map data.

Are you not violating the licence in this case? Or do you make the new dataset available under the same licence? I think the licence is one of OSM’s big problems.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#216

Post by petre »

voltagex_ wrote: post #212
petre wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=ge…

How intensive is it to rasterise on demand?

Depends on the degree of complexity of the tiles. We tried it (using tilecache or tilestache and mapproxy) and it becomes unresponsive when you rasterize several tiles (9). It can take several secons for a busy tile. If the user gets impacient like I do, zooms in and out and pans the map, it freezes to a halt. It's doable over clear water and maybe on the highway, but not in busy cities, at least not with hundreds of users requesting on demand tiles and without an insane amount of rendering resources. My impression is that it works if you're the only user and a really patient one at that.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#217

Post by jokoon »

I believe that OSM should deliver data, and not a service because it's extremely data-demanding.

Although I have to say that since OSM offers data, they could make an effort into providing good exports of that data, with better segmentation and choice of format. You should not have to download planet.osm or use some overpass API. The choices are very limited, and offering data through XML is insufficient.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#218

Post by andrewshadura »

makomk wrote: post #149
milcron wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about OSMAnd for Android? https://osmand.net/

I've found OSMAnd quite buggy and temperamental, plus it heavily pushes you to the paid version if you want up to date maps (so you could effectively ending up paying a third party to access your own mapping work unreliably).

That's not quite true. You pay a small amount once and you get it for life, and you can opt to support development and mappers by a really tiny amount (€1.20) monthly, but you don't have to.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#219

Post by rspeer »

aluhut wrote: post #185

CTRL+F street complete Nothing. Even though you've commented on my post. Guess, it would have got in the way of the flow of negativity. Same goes for maps.me.

This sounds like it was meant as some kind of direct message to emacsen. Do you want to explain to anyone else what you mean?

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#220

Post by jadavies »

makomk wrote: post #149
milcron wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about OSMAnd for Android? https://osmand.net/

I've found OSMAnd quite buggy and temperamental, plus it heavily pushes you to the paid version if you want up to date maps (so you could effectively ending up paying a third party to access your own mapping work unreliably).

I use the paid for product but, from what I remember, you get the same maps with the free version. The difference between the two is that you're limited to 10 (?) maps download in the free version.
Post reply on HN