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Openstreetmap is having a moment

joemorrison.medium.com

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Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#61

Post by resonantjacket5 »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #59

It seems that tile hosting is a large business. Apple, Mapbox, Mapzen, Google? all offer free tiers for their tiles that cost big $$$$ once you go over the limit. I have thought about making a generic API for centering a map, adding a marker, etc that would map (pun intended) the instructions onto the respective JS Api (Mapbox.js, MapKit JS, ...) allowing you to rotate between the services on each page load as to not…

You'd increase the "free tier" a bit but with the trade-off of much more complex coding. I'm not really sure if I'd be worth it.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#62

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

sanguy wrote: post #57
adrianb wrote: post #50

It's interesting that all the big tech companies except Google are invested in OSM, but at the same time none of them bought one of the classic, "traditional" digital map makers - Here Maps formerly Nokia, formerly NavTeq and TomTom formerly TeleAtlas. They would certainly have the budget so I wonder why they weren't interested? Do they think it's better to pool their resources into one digital map data source? Are t…

Apple a couple years ago added 16,000 employees in India for its map "update" group - I bet it's pretty easy to guess what they were doing isn't it? That was a far better investment versus buying a relic from the propreitary vehicle navigation data era who are still surviving selling yearly DVD updates and wondering when the last of their cheese will vanish..... CarPlay and Android Auto have decimated that business -…

…which is unrelated to whether their maps are any good.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#63

Post by SteveCoast »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #35

As a long-time OSM contributor (former editing software maintainer, former OSM Foundation board member yadda yadda) I like this piece, because it actually gets the "mutual aid" dynamic between corporate OSM and enthusiast OSM. The two should not be opposed. Rather, the more people are exposed to OSM via Facebook, Apple and so on, the more enthusiast contributors OSM gets. The more rendering tech that Mapbox releases…

As a long-time OSM contributor (former software creator, creator of OSM Foundation board yadda yadda) I like this piece also.

Hi Richard :-)

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#64

Post by tppiotrowski »

resonantjacket5 wrote: post #61
tppiotrowski wrote: post #59

It seems that tile hosting is a large business. Apple, Mapbox, Mapzen, Google? all offer free tiers for their tiles that cost big $$$$ once you go over the limit. I have thought about making a generic API for centering a map, adding a marker, etc that would map (pun intended) the instructions onto the respective JS Api (Mapbox.js, MapKit JS, ...) allowing you to rotate between the services on each page load as to not…

You'd increase the "free tier" a bit but with the trade-off of much more complex coding. I'm not really sure if I'd be worth it.

The consumer of this "library" would just configure their Mapbox, Mapzen, Apple API keys and do something like:

  map.center(23.12, -156.12)
  map.placeMarker(23.12, -156.12)
This would in turn load and display a location marker using either a Google Map, Apple Map, Mapbox, etc on each subsequent load. The complexity would be in implementing it, but using it would be simple.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#65

Post by Bqhatevwr »

juliansimioni wrote: post #3
rathel wrote: post #2

Regarding corporate contributions: Often the corporations take the route of least resistance - employing dispensable workers who don't live in countries they're mapping [1], and aren't given proper training. It seems that southeast Asia (e.g. Thailand) is the major place for such dubious mapping efforts. [2] There's also a minor conflict of authority: paid mappers (like all mappers) should defer to the community, but…

Isn't it potentially the opposite? If an independent, volunteer mapper contributes a poor edit, someone from the community has to reach out to them individually. This is hard since there's no prior relationship, and no expectation that the person will even take any advice on editing. Contrast that to a major corporate contributor: the people leading these corporate mapping teams are all talking. Both to each other, a…

I think one can appeal to the morals and desire to be good/useful with a community mapper, but one cannot with a corporation, especially a publicly traded one.

If Facebook decides that the metadata format/style for a particular field should be X because otherwise they'd have to spend $______ of engineering resources on reworking their mobile app and fuck the OSM community which has decided it should be Y, for completely valid reasons that were debated and decided upon by the community....and then all of their hundreds of 10-cents-an-hour drones start submitting changes with the new style...the community is screwed. Especially if it accepts money from Facebook, because there's a power imbalance no matter how much paperwork you have saying "thou shalt not get anything from thy donation."

If you want a great example of how corporate involvement corrupts - look at Firefox, which has been caught not only with its hand in the Collecting User Data cookie jar, but inserted software for the makers of a TV show (Mr. Robot) and software nobody asked for, with no way to disable it (Paper, I think it was/is called?)

Not only did they get caught with their hand in the Collecting User Data cookie jar, but when someone brought it to the public's attention via the bugtracker, the bug was locked almost immediately by a mozilla employee. Then that was reversed. Then the project manager for said project who had previously worked at a data analytics company re-classified the bug as secret/internal-only, and it quietly all disappeared under the rug.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#66

Post by peterburkimsher »

walrus01 wrote: post #51
folli wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any good tutorials on this? What are the required specs? I assume the dataset is huge?

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_Map https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Deploying_your_own_Slipp... https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/ It's small enough that I have a self hosted test tile server in my home office with about 8TB of storage, on a WD hard drive that was shucked out of a USB3 enclosure. https://medium.com/gowombat/self-hosted-open-source-cheap-al...

I had a look at self-hosting Nominatim, but got scared away by the hardware requirements. I only have a spare 2015 MacBook Pro 13" with 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB of SSD. I only need small countries (New Zealand, Taiwan, Switzerland), but I'm not sure whether this will reduce the system requirements.

"A minimum of 2GB of RAM is required or installation will fail. For a full planet import 64GB of RAM or more are strongly recommended. Do not report out of memory problems if you have less than 64GB RAM. For a full planet install you will need at least 800GB of hard disk space (take into account that the OSM database is growing fast). SSD disks will help considerably to speed up import and queries. Even on a well configured machine the import of a full planet takes at least 2 days. Without SSDs 7-8 days are more realistic." [0]

I'd also like to render tiles in the OSM Bright theme. The default OpenStreetMap just looks kind of unattractive to me.

In the end I just use an old version of Galileo Offline Maps (now Guru Maps) with tiles scraped from Google using MOBAC. [1]. I made MOBAC profiles for every country [2] so I can just re-scrape them when I have a fast Internet connection.

[0] https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/admin/Installation...

[1] https://mobac.sourceforge.io/

[2] https://github.com/peterburk/mobacProfiles

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#67

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

matli wrote: post #54
adrianb wrote: post #50

It's interesting that all the big tech companies except Google are invested in OSM, but at the same time none of them bought one of the classic, "traditional" digital map makers - Here Maps formerly Nokia, formerly NavTeq and TomTom formerly TeleAtlas. They would certainly have the budget so I wonder why they weren't interested? Do they think it's better to pool their resources into one digital map data source? Are t…

One of the issues for the traditional map makers is their ability to keep up with updates. It requires a massive infrastructure to quickly discover and submit all the small changes that goes on in the real world all the time. One of the few viable ways is crowdsourcing. So over time, the traditional maps degrades in quality, while OSM continuously gets better.

Does OSM continuously get better faster than it gets worse? A few years ago I started contributing heavily to OSM and found that a lot of the data was out of date or missing. I made some really good maps of my local area but now a few years later a lot of that data is out of date and no one will bother to update it.

Google and Apple maps have the advantage that businesses will go and update their own data because its in their own interest to make sure those maps are up to date.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#68

Post by twic »

kazinator wrote: post #5
rubinlinux wrote: post #4

> OSM is to Wikipedia as an atlas is to an encyclopedia. LOL? OSM is to an atlas as Wikipedia is to an encyclopedia. Surely?

That makes no difference: OSM Wikipedia ^ ^ | | | | v v Atlas Encyclopedia It's just which parallels of the commutativity diagram do you focus on. The map-versus-text operator (left to right), or the digital-versus-dead-tree operator (top down).

sighs and resets the It Has Been ... Days Since Someone Brought Up Category Theory On HN counter

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#69

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

dmitriid wrote: post #60
samcrawford wrote: post #40

After I did a Show HN about my OSM-powered project ( https://trailrouter.com ), I saw first hand a little of the positive impact of large corporate involvement in OSM. Two of the very large companies mentioned in the article got in touch with me to find out what what could be done to improve the state of data in OSM useful for pedestrian routing. They were conscious that a disproportionate amount of effort went into…

> After I did a Show HN about my OSM-powered project ( https://trailrouter.com ), This is just amazing! I immediately bookmarked and sent it to friends. But I'm not a runner myself, I prefer bikes :) Do you perchance know of something similar for bikes? Though in Sweden, where I live right now, Trail Router would work very well for bikes, too, especially outside cities.

cycle.travel (my site!) is OSM-powered bike routing, including a “n km from start point” feature. Always happy to hear comments and suggestions.

https://cycle.travel/map

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#70

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #59

It seems that tile hosting is a large business. Apple, Mapbox, Mapzen, Google? all offer free tiers for their tiles that cost big $$$$ once you go over the limit. I have thought about making a generic API for centering a map, adding a marker, etc that would map (pun intended) the instructions onto the respective JS Api (Mapbox.js, MapKit JS, ...) allowing you to rotate between the services on each page load as to not…

Leaflet JS is a generic library that works with mapbox and other tileserver apis. So yes you actually could do this trivially right now.

The API to tileservers is trivial, you provide a URL template and request the tile with the x/y/zoom you want and the tileserver responds with either a cached tile or it will render it on demand.

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