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Openstreetmap is having a moment

joemorrison.medium.com

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Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#81

Post by peterburkimsher »

walrus01 wrote: post #73
peterburkimsher wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

If all you want to host is a "slippy map" tile server for maps, but no search features, it's considerably less. In my case, it's not hard for me to create an off-laptop VM as a resource... I would not want to attempt self hosting OSM on my own laptop. No matter how powerful it is. If it's for any sort of for-profit company use (like the ISPs using openstreetmap for network monitoring maps I mentioned in the same thre…

My laptop is better than what the company can provide! Just because I work at a "for-profit" startup doesn't mean they actually make a profit. I even had to transition our servers from AWS to DigitalOcean just to save on server costs.

I'll probably first look into running it on a dedicated SSD on the spare laptop, and if that goes well, move some subset onto my main laptop (2014 MacBook Pro 15" with 4TB SSD).

For a "slippy map", I use Leaflet with some scraped MOBAC tiles. https://github.com/peterburk/bamb

Search/geocode is missing though, and that's what would really make it more useful. Particularly if I can cut down the geographic range to squeeze it onto my 64GB phone.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#82

Post by Krasnol »

I wish those corporate giants would invest into some fresh satellite data for the whole world. With date tags on it.

It's really hard to work on remote areas of the planet while it's where I currently have the most fun exploring but sometimes it's just impossible to judge which satellite data provider has the freshest material and even if you find out it's more than often really badly outdated.

Unfortunately those big guys probably have no business interest in some backwater districts of Kazakhstan.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#83

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

RileyJames wrote: post #71

One of my favourite mapping apps is iOverlander. Basically an offline first wiki build on top of OSM, which I believe contributes back to OSM. Which I guess makes it an OSM client of sorts. I love it because it’s super basic, no monetisation, no bullshit. Without OSM, these things can not exist. (Note the website version isn’t great, but on iOS is works perfectly) http://ioverlander.com/ Knowing that more corporate /…

iOverlander is a proprietary app. Its database is not freely available outside the app, and fairly little of the information added there makes its way into OpenStreetMap. Also, iOverlander requires Google Play Services, so it isn’t usable on Android distributions that are more privacy-respecting, like LineageOS.

As a cycle tourer myself, I agree that iOverlander’s wealth of detail on certain routes is useful, but I really hope it gets superseded by a more libre alternative.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#84

Post by sp8962 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #76
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…

I worked at Nokia in the maps unit around the time that MS tried to leverage OSM and ended up licensing maps from Navteq. Trust me, everybody was very interested in OSM but also very aware of the legalities of that. Google started building its own maps in response to Nokia first buying Navteq (in 2006, which Google was depending on at the time) and subsequently offering free navigation on the N95 (S60) and later phon…

Except that both MS (Bing) and Apple use OSM. Not all over the place and not for all purposes, but they do and it isn't a secret.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#85

Post by sp8962 »

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…

It isn't a big business by many orders of magnitude.

The only businesses that over the years have been able to offer tile hosting as a sustainable business are very small mum and pop shops.

The large players are naturally not interested directly in the money aspect of providing the service, but in synergies with other, actually profitable, parts of their business.

And those in between are always in between pivots.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#86

Post by folmar »

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.

Brouter (brouter.de) is your friend. A lot of options to tune to your preferences and a decent height model for evading ascents.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#87

Post by stereo »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #48
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…

Out of curiosity, is the Facebook infringement well known in the community, but considered too big an issue to broach, not worth putting time into, etc.?

It is relatively well known. The attribution is imperfect in some places, lacking in other places.

If you'd like an example, examine the map on https://m.facebook.com/Stekerlapatte

Facebook is, in all fairness, contributing to the OSMF's efforts to come up with new, better, clear attribution guidelines, and they are understandably waiting for them to be approved before overhauling things. The current draft would require the actual text to be shown in the example I've shared above.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#88

Post by labawi »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #67
matli wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When businesses realize people actually use OSM and updates are 10x easier, they will make sure to keep it up to date, for the same reasons. OSM actually needs less popularity to stay up to date, it's just not there (yet).

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#89

Post by tasuki »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #69
dmitriid wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Thank you Richard, https://cycle.travel/ is amazing!

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#90

Post by stereo »

Havoc wrote: post #52

Love it. I hope they make their tile servers a little more torrent like. I'd love to chip in but the requirements are just out of my league. Symetrical gigabit sure...but 30TB a month. Don't think my ISP is buying that as residential use. So I'll just stick to seeding linux ISOs...

The beta testing of torrents for planet dumps was actually announced just minutes ago: https://twitter.com/OSM_Tech/status/1329182062516051970
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