191–200 of 210 posts
Timely. Just started a project to document Bosnia and Hercegovina's remaining minefields on OSM. The build system consumes PDFs from the European Union Force as they are updated, georeferences them and pushes the features to OSM. Many tile sets on live maps are updated within the week!
Do you have any more documentation on what you're doing, how you're doing it? That sounds interesting. Any OSM Wiki page about the project?
For anyone that doesn't know, it's trivial to load OSM onto a Garmin GPS and use is for turn-by-turn navigation, for free. I've used it in over 40 countries (including Africa, Europe, North America) and it is staggeringly complete and accurate. From the mega capital cities to the tiniest village, it has every single dirt track, school, hospital, gas station, roundabout, intersection, etc. etc. I can count on one hand…
Some countries are mapped poorly in OSM. Examples are: Mongolia and Cambodia. Many roads and buildings are missing.
I evaluated OSM for an AR real-world strategy game (like pokemon go) I was building years ago (terramango.com), as implementing it would have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. Problem with it in the US is that so many places don't have parcel boundaries, and if they do, they are often pretty far off from reality. We ended up using Google Maps (cost wasn't an issue yet because we were only in a private beta stag…
OSM should be big enough to scrape their own parcels / subscribe to someone who does at this point. I wonder if this is still an issue... AR RTS is my use case as well, and the mapping is obviously a huge component. I think Pokemon Go switched to OSM a couple years ago, didn't they?
You do realise OSM runs on like £50,000 per year, and has basically sorta one employee? it's not that big!
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Oh, it's fairly realistic for an individual with `cron`, no worries. But the up-front setup is still nontrivial, and running a server costs at least power, if not system administration time.
In theory you could automate generating the tiles, but you can't really automate downloading the dataset; it's enormous (hundreds of Go IIRC) and most of the time has to be checked by hand.
That said, I am using the dataset for generating a map, but I'm only using a country extract - which only goes up to some hundreds of MB, and updates on the order of tens of kilobytes. Far more manageable.
The OSM initiative is fantastic, but only the data is good. The software around it is low-quality, and the documentation is not good enough. I once managed to import data exports I found on geofabrik and load it into a spatialite database. It was not very complicated but it was difficult to find help to understand what I was doing. But doing it felt pretty good. I still have to test if what I loaded actually works th…
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Interesting, like I said I've never seen a country that isn't shockingly good. I travelled extensively in 35 African countries - including a bunch you wouldn't expect to get good data for like The DRC, Burundi, Sudan, Mali, Gambia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, etc. As well as Belgium, France, Spain, Canada, USA
It's pretty bad in my city in the U.S., or at least was a few years ago when I last tried to volunteer some editing time. Guess I should look again.
What do you see lacking in your city?
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Still, judging by the parent comment, it sounds like setting up a tile server in OSM isn't exactly trivial. Rather than editing, In my comment above, I meant PostGIS, not OpenGIS. Anyway, I was interested in this at the time for a hobby project and (rightly) decided the effort would not be worth it. Thanks for the insight!
Depends on the level of effort you want to put into it. I've been working on a hobby project with PostGIS recently, and I've found it very easy to get started (a few hours to get PostGIS running + import just the UK's dataset using osm2pgsql). But it's taken me months to get to a point where I'd say I'm pretty experienced with it.
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Still, judging by the parent comment, it sounds like setting up a tile server in OSM isn't exactly trivial. Rather than editing, In my comment above, I meant PostGIS, not OpenGIS. Anyway, I was interested in this at the time for a hobby project and (rightly) decided the effort would not be worth it. Thanks for the insight!
Importing OSM data into PostGIS is mostly painless with imposm3, probably because it's actually documented, unlike most other pieces in the tile-serving stack. The biggest hurdle is probably understanding both the OSM and SQL way of thinking.
I understand your comment about sql thinking, in my day-to-day work I'm a bit of a reluctant sql developer (shudders in procedural spaghetti) but am gaining appreciation for being able to hand off aggregations and calculations to the db.
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It's pretty bad in my city in the U.S., or at least was a few years ago when I last tried to volunteer some editing time. Guess I should look again.
I just drove 35,000 miles around the US this summer through about 30 states, and OSM had absolutely every single road, intersection and detail I could ever hope for perfectly mapped. I used it solely for navigation in a ton of places I've never been before, and it was brilliant. What do you see lacking in your city?