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Switch to OpenStreetMap

switch2osm.org

201–210 of 210 posts

Re: Switch to OpenStreetMap

#201
post #191

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!

> pushes the features to OSM 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?

I'm writing up some docs with info. I'll send you a link.

Re: Switch to OpenStreetMap

#202
post #4

I've tried over and over again to switch to OSM but everytime I've reverted back to Google Maps and Citymapper. I've even contributed to OSM to fix bits I'm around but it's hard. I don't drive so I rely heavily on public transport, and so for me that's the biggest selling point for any such tool. Unfortunately I've yet to find an OSM app that can do this in a useful manner as Citmapper and Google do. Unfortunately th…

Maps.me is what finally has allowed me to mostly switch with offline maps, good routing, and support for all modes of transit I use consistently. https://maps.me/

If I look for bus stations, select United States of America as country (would have been nice if it geo-located my IP address here) and try to pick the 'locality', for 'San Jose' it offers only "San Jose/Northern Marina Islands", "village Hacienda San Jose (Puerto Rico)" and "village San Jose (Illinois)". Wonder why people think the Internet centers around the SF Bay Area ...

Re: Switch to OpenStreetMap

#203
post #45

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…

Any recommended Garmin model? When I check the OSM site, the information seems some what sparse.

Re: Switch to OpenStreetMap

#205
post #195
post #163

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…

Do you have any recommendation for displaying vector maps in C++ (native program, not web)? The whole field seems very confusing.

Not at all, I don't. I tried rendering those mbtiles myself, and I failed.

You can do as I as I did, import data from exports available on geofabrik into spatialite. And then progressively render data from spatialite (I did not try that step).

ogr2ogr allows you to do this:

    ogr2ogr -f "SQLite" db.sqlite roads.shp -dsco  SPATIALITE=YES
You can find those .shp here http://download.geofabrik.de/

Then the query in spatialite, here with python:

    where2 = lambda lng, lat, dist: " where PtDistWithin(geom, GeomFromText('POINT(%f %f)', 4326), %f, 0)"%(lng, lat, dist)
    select2 = lambda lng, lat, dist: "select id, AsText(geom) from points "+where2(lng, lat, dist)

Re: Switch to OpenStreetMap

#206
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "hilly" a simple binary indicator on each street (or section of road) or is there an entire layer of elevation data included in the world data?

In my app, yes, it's a binary flag. But in the underlying data you can get detailed elevation data for every section of road worldwide that is readily usable in open source routing engines. GraphHopper supports STRM and CGIAR (two different data elevation data sources, available globally and free to use).

SRTM is pretty bad, but good enough until height data is easier to work with.

Re: Switch to OpenStreetMap

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machine is not, and neither is the world. Even if it were, it would still not be as good. It would not tell you about materials, tolerances, or many other important things.

It isn't a requirement for a map to capture all characteristics of an area to be considered a map.

That does not mean you can just leave out anything you want, though.

Re: Switch to OpenStreetMap

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to build my own OSM server a couple months back. I quickly abandoned when I discovered that the amount of processing to import their world map data file in Postgres would require several months (desktop Core i7 3770k / 16 GB ram but a 7200 rpm hard drive since there wasn't enough space on my SSD). For a world map server you would need a beefy machine to make it less painful, something like 64 GB ram, multi nv…

> the amount of processing to import their world map data file in Postgres would require several months I'd be surprised if this were indeed the case, even on spinning disks. Did you use the pbf export? I can load it in two or three days using osm2pgsql on my home desktop (albeit with SSDs). On the £10k+ work server it loads in about 24 hours. The issue with providing a Postgres dump is that people often want differe…

osm2pgsql ran a few hours for the first phase, then I let it run a couple days on the second phase (there are 3 phases IIRC).

I then calculated how long it would take to finish the second phase according to how much it had accomplished in those few days and I calculated that I would have to let my PC on until December 15 (it was back in September or October I think).

Re: Switch to OpenStreetMap

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, map data means just the data required to know what is where. I wouldn't count "satellite" images, geocoding, street view or anything like that as map data, but their own, distinct things. As it stands, OSM is one of the big 3 in that field, together with Google and Microsoft. Both of the latter might be as good when it comes to streets and buildings, but OSM destroys them when you also include hiking/bike trai…

It's not quite like that. The three main commercial providers which have their own data are Google, TomTom and HERE(which Microsoft uses). TomTom and HERE would be more than happy to sell it to you for a fee - it's their main source of revenue. The data TomTom and HERE have is focused on navigation use cases - it doesn't have so much 'visual' stuff as OSM but has has large quantities of information that is only relev…

Huh, I thought I remembered something about Microsoft buying HERE. Glad to hear that's not the case. I did also completely forget about TomTom - last time I used their stuff was on a Palm Tungsten T3... Amazing that they are still around!

Re: Switch to OpenStreetMap

#210
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck for your meeting! They might have at least georeferenced source files, no? You might have an easier time convincing them to work with you if you point out that this is the best and easiest way of getting the location of the mine fields into many people's phones and pockets.

Thanks. Georeferenced files, raw data, and using OSM directly are the 3 asks.

How did your meeting go?
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