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OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

blog.emacsen.net

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Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#221

Post by andrewshadura »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #163
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.

Justin O'Beirne's argument is essentially that Google Maps is much better at being Google Maps than any other map provider. Which is true, but Google doesn't get to define "maps". Indeed, Google Maps as expounded by Mr O'Beirne is the very antithesis of OSM. He argues that Google is unstoppable because of its technology: that it can derive building shapes, heights, etc. from imagery much better than anyone else can.…

In fact, there are people like me who find addresses very fun to survey. A bit less fun to actually enter, true :)

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#222

Post by iamdave »

voltagex_ wrote: post #213
iamdave wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Good question.

I'm only a hobbyist with GIS, so I can't really say or speak to how practical of a format KML/KMZ are in production.

But that's a really good question.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#223

Post by dalbasal »

twblalock wrote: post #17
dalbasal wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... Nothing similar to Wikipedia has really happened in the last ten years. It's a fairly unique thing, still as relevant and important as ever. Hard to say if it's because Wikipedia was a long shot at any time, or because of the 90s web vs the current one, culturally or technically.

I think its because anything similar just gets implemented as part of Wikipedia/Wikimedia at this point.

True. I sort of meant "similar"in a wider sense: large scale, community effort to do something useful. Wikipedia represents a lot about what we that the internet, and internet culture was.^

Remember how big a deal Wikipedia is. A lot of that "human knowledge at your fingertips" is Wikipedia.

Maybe that applies at a bigger level, with "similar"things being implemented as part of something. I suspect that a big part of the reason Wikipedias don't get started now is that they get implemented as startups.

Anything showing promise on that scale is a "unicorn" and in 2018 Jimmy Wales would have had a choice between private/startup and internet-owned. That's a billion dollar choice. For example, stack overflow could have been built like a Wikipedia. If it was done in 1996, that would be a sensible choice. In 2018, a founder would be forgoing an unthinkable sum of money, and also resources to make it happen with.

^I guess all this needs to be caveated with "other than OSS."

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#224

Post by stereo »

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…

Here’s something similar I’ve built: https://stereo.lu/charely

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#225

Post by qwerty456127 »

IMHO internet projects, especially free data-centric projects shold just be made as granular as possible. There should be a project to maintain the actual data base and independent projects to display and integrate this data. And as far as I know this is how it actually is in the world of OSM though the actual projects are not being developed and marketed actively enough. I may be wrong - I have never really used OSM (I prefer the proprietary map project native to the country I live in - it does the local job much better than both OSM and Google), just read about it a number of times.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#226

Post by rmc »

lucideer wrote: post #197
djsumdog wrote: post #174

Earlier 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

You can get country level extracts, which can be updated every day. Nearly any server which can import OSM data is able to keep it up to date.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#227

Post by rmc »

djsumdog wrote: post #174
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…

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?

Yes, you can do just that.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#228

Post by rspeer »

IntronExon wrote: post #2

Re: the issues with moderation, I sometimes wonder if Wikipedia were trying to start from scratch in the last few years... would it work? With all of the trolls and bots, easy access it might have died hard and early. 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…

It appears to me that there was a golden age of crowdsourcing that lasted from maybe 1999 to 2010.

If you started a project in this time, you had the chance to get lots of quality contributions, for free, from people whose motivation is just to be part of something.

Now, you will get:

- Modern trolling, as you point out. Well-organized armies of trolls, some working for political purposes, some just for the lulz, can subvert anything.

- Disruptive bots (I don't know why this is a change since the golden age, but maybe it's simply that more people are better at programming)

- Spam that's a full-time job to moderate

- Lack of motivation because there are so many other fascinating things on the Internet

- A change in expectations because money has entered the equation -- crowdsourcing is now something that people do as a menial job, and they aren't paid enough to do it well

The sabotage by 4chan of the crowdsourcing team in the Pentagon shredder challenge [1; sorry about the stupid title] makes a good indicator of the end of the crowdsourcing era. That happened in 2011.

I run a project, ConceptNet [2], that has obtained a lot of its data from crowdsourcing. Years ago, I stopped supporting the ability for the public to edit ConceptNet directly. (This does not mean the project shut down. Far from it. It currently produces state-of-the-art NLP models.) Supporting public contributions became obviously not worth the effort. Some projects that started at the right time and maintained excellent communities are still working, though -- Wiktionary would be an example, and it's one of the places that still provides new data to ConceptNet.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/02/how-a-lone-hacker-shredded-the...

[2] http://conceptnet.io

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#229

Post by rmc »

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.

> It wasn't possible. We'd have to add it via JOSM or the web based editor.

That's strange. What were you trying to do? If you convert your data to OSM's relatively simple XML format, you can open that file in JOSM, and just press the upload button. That's what most people do with imports. It's possible to communicate with the OSM API directly and make API calls, but that's essentially what JOSM does. JOSM also has a validator, which can spot some problems with your data.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#230

Post by rmc »

tomkinson wrote: post #201

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…

You can install Nominatim om your own hardware and then make as many queries as you want. There are also companies offering hosted Nominatim (e.g. geofabrik), which will come with a limit and a way to see how much you have used.
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