Amazon Location Service • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Location Service

#81

Post by kylebarron » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 11:32 PM UTC

lights0123 wrote: post #80

kylebarron wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be referring to very processed satellite images, but AWS has many more satellite/aerial data sources than GCP in their Open Data program [0]: https://registry.opendata.aws/sentinel-2/ [1]: https://registry.opendata.aws/sentinel-2-l2a-cogs/ [2]: https://registry.opendata.aws/landsat-8/ [3]: https://registry.opendata.aws/naip/

Those are way too low-res for typical satellite map usage, though. It doesn't even look to have a pixel/house resolution, even.

Well it depends, it's true that Landsat is only 15m resolution, and Sentinel is 10m, but if you only need US-coverage, NAIP is 60cm resolution.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#82

Post by bigiain » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 12:10 AM UTC

amanzi wrote: post #68

guruz wrote: post #32

> You can choose between maps and map styles provided by Esri and by HERE Technologies, I wonder why not use the HERE or Esri APIs directly? Is this just a marketing gimmick so Amazon can complete their offering? https://developer.here.com/

I've used HERE maps for a couple of small projects (using leaflet.js plus HERE map tiles) and it works really well. The HERE developer experience is pretty sweet actually.

HERE's big "trick" is their accurate gradient data. If you're driving big heavy trucks around, and want to take advantage of routing around steep hills to save in fuel costs, HERE are your best choice by far. (Or at least, they were 4-5 years back, anyway...)

They also have some interesting indoor location/mapping stuff I've read about but not used in anger, which seems to be quite promising too. The ability to map and locate phones in multi story buildings including getting each floor right with individual floorplans is not a trivial thing to get right. Their docs, at least, make it seem like they know how to solve that for you.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#83

Post by gregsadetsky » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 12:27 AM UTC

Sorry for posting a second comment, but this just occurred to me:

Mapbox serves all of its customers’ vector tiles through AWS CloudFront.

Is this a possible case of Amazon seeing Mapbox’s traffic numbers, being able to estimate revenue based on pricing/the number of average tiles loaded per map session, and deciding that it was worth to take a plunge?

(There might have been other factors too but — was this /not/ a factor?)

To be very (... paranoid doesn’t feel like the right word), wouldn’t Amazon also have info in the same way on Mapbox’s largest customers and know who to pursue/target first for their new service?

Re: Amazon Location Service

#84

Post by poxrud » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 1:15 AM UTC

jjwiseman wrote: post #67

Because I don't think a lot of people know about it, I'll mention pelias here. If you have 16 GB RAM and 600 GB of disk, you can have a free, open source, pre-populated geo database that covers the entire planet. https://github.com/pelias/pelias Pelias does geocoding (turns addresses, POIs, and administrative regions into coordinates), reverse geocoding (given coordinates, finds nearby POIs, addresses, neighborhood,…

Another good option for self hosted geolocation is using Postgresql+PostGIS.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#85

Post by booi » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 1:26 AM UTC

poxrud wrote: post #84

jjwiseman wrote: post #67

Because I don't think a lot of people know about it, I'll mention pelias here. If you have 16 GB RAM and 600 GB of disk, you can have a free, open source, pre-populated geo database that covers the entire planet. https://github.com/pelias/pelias Pelias does geocoding (turns addresses, POIs, and administrative regions into coordinates), reverse geocoding (given coordinates, finds nearby POIs, addresses, neighborhood,…

Another good option for self hosted geolocation is using Postgresql+PostGIS.

That's not really comparable. It's kind of like saying you can have a self-hosted search engine by using Elasticsearch. The devil is in the data and details.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#86

Post by peter303 » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 1:32 AM UTC

How does OpenStreetMap compare to this?

Re: Amazon Location Service

#87

Post by nogbit » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 1:33 AM UTC

james2406 wrote: post #37

What a ridiculous name for an AWS services /s

Top comment there, should be called something like AWS WGS84 to really confuse people like all the other services.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#88

Post by uptime » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 3:33 AM UTC

Anyone know if Location can/will offer street view? With the new amazon trucks driving around they could grab a ton of updated images every day.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#89

Post by mypalmike » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 3:48 AM UTC

harrisonjackson wrote: post #8

I wonder if this is related to the recent shift of mapbox away from OSS. Was on page 1 in the last week. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25347310

Products developed at Amazon typically take more than a week from start to launch.

Re: Amazon Location Service

#90

Post by scanny » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 3:51 AM UTC

pheelicks wrote: post #22

I've read through all the docs and it is unclear if aerial imagery is supported. I just launched a JavaScript 3D mapping library ( https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js ) and would be up for trying it out if it were supported. Also interesting to see them use Mapbox as an example of an open source library that can be used with this. They obviously haven't been paying attention this past week.

This was posted a while after your comment:

------------ kylebarron 8 hours ago [–]

That's why they point to Mapbox GL JS v1 in the script tag [0] [0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/location/latest/developerguide/t...

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