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

How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

theodi.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 177 posts

Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

#41

Post by danbolt »

nickysielicki wrote: post #22
ucaetano wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

Interesting, when I took Geography 101 the first thing they taught was “mapping is super subjective”.

Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

#44

Post by webreac »

detuur wrote: post #38
ucaetano wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since they are using this strategy, translation of idioms is terrible. I have switched translate.

Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

#45

Post by [deleted] »

ucaetano wrote: post #29
nickysielicki wrote: post #22

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

#46

Post by nickysielicki »

ucaetano wrote: post #29
nickysielicki wrote: post #22

Earlier 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.

I'll agree that what layers a map ought to show is a subjective matter.

But if you have two maps and they both have a shared subset of layers, you can (for that subset) objectively evaluate which map more accurately represents the real world, eg: has more objects than the other map, and/or has objects marked more accurately.

And what I'm saying is that for the layers that they have in common, I think OSM wins hands down.

Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

#47

Post by hoschicz »

yur3i__ wrote: post #42

I want to try openstreetmap, whats the best client available for android? (Pref. f-droid)

MAPS.ME is the best one by a pretty fat margin, I'd say.

Map viewing is wonderful, the best I have experienced on Android. It's very fast and super detailed.

Routing has some issues. The estimates are way off, routing by bike means road bike (not MTB) and the voiceover speaks too early or too late.

Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

#48

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

danpat wrote: post #10
nextos wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSM worked great for me on newly built streets in Cambridge UK, where Google Maps had zero cartography. The only major disadvantage of OSM-derived applications is the lack of real-time traffic information. Google Maps harvests data from phones inside cars and some car navigation systems. They also buy it from third parties. http://opentraffic.io/ is trying to do some data harvesting, but it's still not very good. Ano…

Here at Mapbox we're doing navigation on OSM with traffic data - we collect our own telemetry, and use it to guide OSM-based routing. There are numerous Android/iOS apps using our API that you could use, or you could build one yourself.

I've been wondering, given that you've made all of the building blocks, why hasn't Mapbox built and released an open source maps app for Android? It looks like you're just weekend's work away from having an open source app which is competetive with Google Maps on F-Droid.

Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

#49

Post by matt4077 »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #36
matt4077 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny you should mention Albania: It's exactly where I learned never to doubt Google Maps.

Specifically, never to assume that "It's like ten meters between these two points... I don't see a reason why we would need to go all the way around".

(There was a 30m deep gorge)

More to the point: Given enough position data, Google should be able to assess all those road parameters you mention, far better than manual entry could ever do at scale. They could easily notice, as but one example, when locals routinely take different routes than they would suggest and modify their data accordingly.

Re: How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

#50

Post by zylepe »

ghaff wrote: post #35
matt4077 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recently switch https://onthegomap.com from google to OSM for walking paths between points. The trail quality is much better where I live (Massachusetts) but I have been getting a lot of complaints from people all over the world that it no longer has their trails. I wonder what the lowest friction way to get my users to help contribute trails to OSM would be?
Post reply on HN