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

OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities

eng.lyft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 252 posts

Re: OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities

#201

Post by aasasd »

guntars wrote: post #14

Lyft has access to some pretty good data on where the roads actually are and if there are any closures. Looks like they are already contributing back, which is awesome. Something I've never heard being done, but could be very helpful for cities, is tracking the bumpiness of roads as a metric for road quality. The city could have near real time access to information on where the potholes are. I'd think they'd be willi…

There's a similar-ish precedent: in my city, OsmAnd can display whether streets have proper lighting. Though I guess that doesn't change as often as asphalt—but then again, I can only envy people if potholes are fixed too fast for them.

Re: OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities

#202

Post by Faaak »

jokteur wrote: post #168
Ayesh wrote: post #4

Good that OSM is accurate in cities as well, because in hiking, skiing, or even some ferry routes, OSM simply wins because that's often the only mapping provider to even have _any_ data. Some of my first hand experiences: - French GR-20 routes. Google maps are laughably empty, while OSM has you covered with almost the same information as the hiking maps you can buy on the trail. - Anapurna - similar to GR-20 situatio…

In my country, there is an amazing government mandated service called Swiss Topo ( https://map.geo.admin.ch ), which can be accessed freely. Here are some features: - detailed maps from 1:10,000 to 1:1,000,000 - hiking routes which are actively maintained. You can create your own hiking routes, and it will estimate the time that it will take to complete them. - historical data, like historical maps since 1864 and aer…

swisstopo is really good, but as far as i know, sadly, only some data is open, and not all of it

Re: OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities

#204

Post by LockAndLol »

darkfirefly wrote: post #178
jokteur wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country, there is an amazing government mandated service called Swiss Topo ( https://map.geo.admin.ch ), which can be accessed freely. Here are some features: - detailed maps from 1:10,000 to 1:1,000,000 - hiking routes which are actively maintained. You can create your own hiking routes, and it will estimate the time that it will take to complete them. - historical data, like historical maps since 1864 and aer…

NSW, Aus offers SIX Maps: https://six.maps.nsw.gov.au (this offers very good imagery of the NSW areas, better than google) That's the easy-to-use-maps. There's also the aus-wide https://nationalmap.gov.au where you get basic satellite maps with the option to add various datasets and even daily maps from Landsat 2A There's also ELVIS foundation spatial data https://elevation.fsdf.org.au There's don't really cover hiki…

Those are all government funded and the data is private, correct?

Re: OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities

#205

Post by RicoElectrico »

Brakenshire wrote: post #196
RicoElectrico wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate where license would be a problem? Keep in mind this: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidel... Which eases the issue a little bit. For instance, MS uses OSM buildings for Bing Maps. Or Apple uses OSM for road data in selected countries (Ukraine?)

I’ll give a contrived example, say you’re a property startup, and you want to produce a walkability rating for each house you sell. You might want to do a calculation on OSM for restaurants within 5 minutes walk, maybe a chef rating for whether there’s a greengrocer, fishmonger, delicatessen and butcher within walking distance, or you want to take into account a walk back from the train station and the opening times…

Well, companies do offer isochrone APIs. That, or graphical maps, are Produced Works under ODbL and only need attribution. Actually enabling that was the point of licence switch in the fall of 2012 which while mostly successful wasn't without pain points (e.g. in Australia key contributors rejected new Contributor Terms and their edits had to be redacted).

Re: OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities

#206

Post by dopidop »

jokteur wrote: post #168
Ayesh wrote: post #4

Good that OSM is accurate in cities as well, because in hiking, skiing, or even some ferry routes, OSM simply wins because that's often the only mapping provider to even have _any_ data. Some of my first hand experiences: - French GR-20 routes. Google maps are laughably empty, while OSM has you covered with almost the same information as the hiking maps you can buy on the trail. - Anapurna - similar to GR-20 situatio…

In my country, there is an amazing government mandated service called Swiss Topo ( https://map.geo.admin.ch ), which can be accessed freely. Here are some features: - detailed maps from 1:10,000 to 1:1,000,000 - hiking routes which are actively maintained. You can create your own hiking routes, and it will estimate the time that it will take to complete them. - historical data, like historical maps since 1864 and aer…

I know that I dearly miss the French IGN. It’s close to impossible to find decent paper map for hiking in the US.

Re: OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities

#208

Post by Brakenshire »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #205
Brakenshire wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll give a contrived example, say you’re a property startup, and you want to produce a walkability rating for each house you sell. You might want to do a calculation on OSM for restaurants within 5 minutes walk, maybe a chef rating for whether there’s a greengrocer, fishmonger, delicatessen and butcher within walking distance, or you want to take into account a walk back from the train station and the opening times…

Well, companies do offer isochrone APIs. That, or graphical maps, are Produced Works under ODbL and only need attribution. Actually enabling that was the point of licence switch in the fall of 2012 which while mostly successful wasn't without pain points (e.g. in Australia key contributors rejected new Contributor Terms and their edits had to be redacted).

Thanks, that’s interesting, it doesn’t match with my reading of the guidelines, again, glad if I’m reading them wrong and you can correct me.

https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidel...

It says clearly there that the underlying database for a produced work has to be published. So can a competitor not just request the derived database directly from a company selling the API?

Also, “ If the published result of your project is intended for the extraction of the original data, then it is a database and not a Produced Work” - does that not exactly describe an API? It talks about mugs, data visualisations, map images, physical maps and so on as produced works. I thought this meant you could protect (i.e. not release) essentially a styling of map data, but not the map data itself, which must be released.

Re: OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities

#210

Post by habi »

Faaak wrote: post #202
jokteur wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country, there is an amazing government mandated service called Swiss Topo ( https://map.geo.admin.ch ), which can be accessed freely. Here are some features: - detailed maps from 1:10,000 to 1:1,000,000 - hiking routes which are actively maintained. You can create your own hiking routes, and it will estimate the time that it will take to complete them. - historical data, like historical maps since 1864 and aer…

swisstopo is really good, but as far as i know, sadly, only some data is open, and not all of it

There's a bit of discussion in `osm_ch` that from March on, the SwissTopo data will be free OpenGovernmentData: https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/swisstopo/free-geodata.htm...

The debate is what 'free' means :)

Post reply on HN