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

Openstreetmap is having a moment

joemorrison.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 153 posts

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#131

Post by juliansimioni »

Bqhatevwr wrote: post #65
juliansimioni wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 complet…

For sure, that's a legitimate concern if/when there's one major corporate contributor that doesn't have to play along with everyone else.

Part of what makes the current OSM situation work is that nobody is bigger than everyone else. If Facebook wants to do their own thing, they're going to be going against Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the rest of the community.

We've seen from both the world of capitalism in general and definitely the software world that consolidation eventually happens, so maybe this situation is inherently unstable and doomed to fail. But IMO the OSM community should work to make it last as long as possible.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#134

Post by joejoebags »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #129

>For instance: I work for a company called Azavea that, among many noble efforts, maintains Cicero. It’s a database of elected officials and legislative districts in several countries around the world that gets updated daily. You can imagine that this should be a public good — like, doesn’t the government already have this information? Turns out…nah. Cicero requires ceaseless, grueling work to keep updated, and that…

Interesting, I wasn't aware of this! I'm sure my colleagues on the Cicero team are, though.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#136

Post by jmkb »

pabs3 wrote: post #112
jmkb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Not currently, the only semi-decent offline OSM map for desktop OS is Gnome Maps. [0] 2. You can't configure the way maps appear on openstreetmap.org. You (or someone) will have to render the map tiles to display all names in English instead of the local language. [1] 3. If you mean keeping a personal list of map and route bookmarks, no. The primary reason to create an OSM account is to contribute data to the map.…

GNOME Maps isn't offline like OsmAnd is though, you can't download new tiles, search, navigate etc without network.

You're quite correct, I should not have described GNOME maps as offline, and my edit window has expired. Rats.

OsmAnd+ (or the free OsmAnd~ version available on FDroid) is definitely the primo consumer-facing OSM-powered map. I haven't tried getting it running on desktop via Android emulation but that might be workable.

Another desktop app worth mentioning is Garmin's Basecamp, a free download (Windows and Mac) for managing Garmin GPS units. It also functions as a desktop map viewer that supports search and routing, though the interface is a little awkward. You can buy maps from Garmin, but you can also convert OSM data into a Basecamp-compatible format. This is very offline -- for any updates you'll have to pull fresh data, reconvert, reinstall. Or you can find someone else who's done the work for you. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#137

Post by mpawelski »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #94
labawi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Do people really use OSM for POI data on any meaningful scale? I tried really hard to use OSM but all the apps were really bad. OSMAnd seemed like the best one but it was super slow rendering on my phone while everything else was snappy. The only use I have seen for OSM data is in 3rd party apps like strava where you only really need street data which is pretty accurate on OSM. Or other specialized cases where you mo…

There are two great app that use OSM data that I see a lot of people use.

* Maps.me - I used it a lot when travelling last year in Southeast Asia. And I noticed many other travellers were using it too. It was basically expected that people use Maps.me there. I guess it helps that it's also integrated with booking.com data so you have a lot of hostels there if you are looking for a place to stay in new cit. However it's a shame that it's not actual POI data from OSM. I had situations where there were two hostels on map, one from OSM and one from booking.com. booking.com was usually wrong by couple of meters, I guess because only owner with booking.com accound could change it...

* Mapy.cz - I mostly dumped masp.me for this app (it has good website too https://en.mapy.cz/). This app is also using OSM data, but shows information more helpful for tourist/biker. Bike paths are superbly displayed, hiking trails often have proper colors (I still need to check if it's OSM tag's data). I highly recommend it.

I tried OSMAnd and IMO this is really mainly for "OSM enthusiasts", not for causal "normal" users that just want to have good map and know where to walk or bike to.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#138

Post by matkoniecz »

stereo wrote: post #87
tweetle_beetle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 requ…

> Facebook is, in all fairness, contributing to the OSMF's efforts to come up with new, better, clear attribution guidelines

As in, trying to redefine their attribution violation as something acceptable. Attribution guidelines draft was rejected because it tried to describe hiding attribution in places that normal user will never see as acceptable.

Facebook is doing some positive things in OSM ecosystem, but it is not a case here.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#139

Post by matkoniecz »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #117

This post inspired me to look around the neighborhood and fix up all the broken stores. Tools have improved greatly since I was here... 10 years ago!

If you have Android and you are interested in occasional mapping then I really recommend StreetComplete.

Registering for OSM account is the biggest hurdle, mapping with this app requires no tutorials/learning how to use it etc.

dislaimer: this is partialy autopromotion, this app is allowing to make some predefined edits adding detail - it is not a full scale editor

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#140

Post by matkoniecz »

joejoebags wrote: post #27
Freak_NL wrote: post #12

One minor nitpick: measuring the output of a mapper is hard to do on the basis of the number of edits. Local mappers appear to have larger edits where many details in a neighbourhood or some topical regional updates are performed. I think corporate editors focus on fixing bugs and weirdness reported by linters, which are much smaller in scale in terms of changeset size.

Not a nitpick at all--interesting observation. Can you think of a better metric by which to measure contributions? (I'm truly asking out of ignorance)

Any metric will have big problems. It is like attempting to measure output of programmer by counting number of commits, added lines, deleted lines, modified lines or time spend in office.

I made edits changing one tag that were far more useful and time-consuming than my other edits that added 9 000 objects.

Post reply on HN