Are Apple and Microsoft's map services built on OpenStreetMap? Or are they just contributing for the heck of it?
Apple Maps lists a whole bunch of data providers. OpenStreetMap is among them.
How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
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Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
#32There is also some controversy around it : the big players do data mixing from different sources, which is not strictly compliant with OSM licenses. Also some say that their bulk editing creates nice map data, but harms local potential mapping communities, with early case of Netherlands where AND contributed map data resulted to no real manual map updates afterwards. So some say that community, not map must come first, so the “guerilla mapping” is bad.
Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mapping is not a subjective topic, though. I'm saying that OSM data is objectively better for the rural parts of the world I've been to.
> I'm saying that OSM data is objectively better for the rural parts of the world I've been to. Which is a subjective factor. "X is objectively better for the categories that I subjectively selected". Mapping is a subjective topic, simply because there are endless ways to evaluate and compare maps, so attributing any type of weight to any factor is a subjective exercise based on your own personal preferences.
What's your reason for thinking Google is the best then? Do you even use maps for anything except major highways?
Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
#34This is great, but I'm surprised to see Apple featured so prominently in the title here alongside Facebook and Microsoft.
Apple has an internal volunteer programmer whereby employees can choose to spend their time contributing to OSM—part of employee benefits (which is nice), whereas Microsoft and Facebook are actually contributing mapping data the company has created/collected to OSM.
Furthermore, just 2 of the 3 listed companies are major sponsors of OSM events: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_of_the_Map_2018#Sp...
Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Only sad thing is perhaps some day we won't be able to have the fun of making contributions ourselves, if the big companies handle all that for us like Google does. There will always be room for individual contributions, because there are things that the big corporations do not care about. For example, many hiking trails and agricultural tracks good for cycling are missing from Google Maps because they simply do no…
I'm pretty sure that Google Maps does auto-discovery of hiking and biking trails by simply watching peoples' positions? At least I've had rather good experiences using Maps for biking. Even small, unofficial paths were mapped, and travel times indicated that Maps had an accurate idea of their condition.
Google's pretty weak for hiking trails in the US in my experience; OSM is far from perfect but it's much better.
They're both significantly worse than maps focused on hikers.
Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Only sad thing is perhaps some day we won't be able to have the fun of making contributions ourselves, if the big companies handle all that for us like Google does. There will always be room for individual contributions, because there are things that the big corporations do not care about. For example, many hiking trails and agricultural tracks good for cycling are missing from Google Maps because they simply do no…
I'm pretty sure that Google Maps does auto-discovery of hiking and biking trails by simply watching peoples' positions? At least I've had rather good experiences using Maps for biking. Even small, unofficial paths were mapped, and travel times indicated that Maps had an accurate idea of their condition.
With auto-discovery of routes, Google might be picking up the most popular routes, but that does that does not mean they are the best ones. For example, on Strava heatmaps you can frequently see routes that are heavily cycled, but they might also be extremely stressful because one has to share the road with traffic. In fact, most cyclists might only be using them because they are sports cyclists with very thin tires unable to explore and find other options. The great thing about OSM is that it only takes a single mapper to find a nearby alternative and add it to the map.
> At least I've had rather good experiences using Maps for biking.
You wouldn’t in many countries around the world. Google Maps is considerably inferior to OpenStreetMap for cycling in much of the Western Balkans, Africa, and Patagonia.
Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Second best? At least in my experience, OSM data is leaps and bounds better than Google Maps in every way possible, and it has been that way for a couple years now. I'm sure that, for whatever product in the world, you can find a subset of people in the world who will swear that such product is, in they experience, the best in the world.
Mapping is not a subjective topic, though. I'm saying that OSM data is objectively better for the rural parts of the world I've been to.
It is a subjective topic. Each service provides different layers of data, with varying amounts of coverage for each layer. People have opinions on how important each layer is, and what's acceptable in terms of coverage for those layers.
Where I went to college, near Rochester NY, housing data is nearly non-existent in OSM, while Google Maps happily provides it and 3D models of them too. Where I am in Seattle, OSM has parking information while Google Maps does not.
Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both are hard and are open problems.
Sure, but very different. Mapping requires real-world operations, such as driving cars and taking pictures around the entire world, and doing it again and again. This is far more cost-intensive, both in upfront as in maintenance, than the translation problem. Software is easy. The real world is hard.
Which is exactly the point. Translation is a real-world problem. You need to actively go into the real world, find problem cases, make your translation software translate it, make your own translation, compare the translations, teach your software to translate it correctly, and hope that your approach is good enough.
The real-world constraint of translation software is building a sizeable quality corpus of real-world text with real-world living human translators. We're lucky that the EU employs literally thousands of translators to publish identical texts across languages (for free!!), which has helped make European languages pretty much a solved problem in machine translation. But anything non-european is still hopelessly incomprehensible, simply because we don't have enough real-world data.
Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
#39This is competitive pressures at work, similarly to IBM and other's investment in Linux in the early 2000's as a way to place competitive pressure on MS/Windows. If you're not the leader in the field, and won't be able to catch up just by investing, you try to make the leadership in the field (Google's) irrelevant. If the 2nd-best-by-small-margin base map info is open, having the best one isn't a competitive advantag…
Google does not have the best base map info. OSM may well be the best global base map, actually. Google's advantage is their applications that use the data.
Citation please? What do base your statement of fact on?
Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mapping is not a subjective topic, though. I'm saying that OSM data is objectively better for the rural parts of the world I've been to.
An interesting benefit of Google Maps which (I don’t think?) is available in OSM: different maps for countries with boundary disputes. Google is basically the de facto map, even as far as many governments are concerned, and so showing localized maps of disputed areas may actually be saving lives.
Osm tracks disputed borders. A vector tile based view could show differences based on location.
The tiles served from osm.org don't.