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Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

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Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSM is so good that even the fire fighters use it in Poland for navigation and finding fire hydrants. The funny thing is that if you modify or add a fire hydrant a guy from the emergency services asks to send a picture of it before he approves the change.

How is this not done by the installer? Seems like a problem that didn’t need crowd sourcing.

That would make sense but at least some companies that maintain hydrants are also using OSM data.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#172
Does anyone know what happened to the Amazon team ? I was following their edits here: https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-changesets?comment=amap

They were one of the main contributors to OSM and now they nearly stop contributing to OSM (they are still contributing but maybe 10 times less than before)

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you contribute to Google Maps then you fix private Google database.

this is not true, you fix it for everyone using Google maps (which is basically everyone)

Where I can download Google map data dataset for my own processing?

Yes, Google makes apps usable by general public but their database is proprietary - including what people contribute for free.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#174

I've always thought OSM's data license should be more BSD-ish than the current LGPLish license. If you were trying to privately build and edit data from OSM, there'd be a pretty strong incentive to get most of your updates and corrections upstreamed back into OSM, (especially for things that are broadly of interest to the rest of the community) because eventually someone will also create those updates in the upstream…

Given how BSD was used to create proprietary MacOS and PlayStation operating systems with basically nothing contributed back - I am not convinced.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify: they maintain(ed) own reviewed replica of OSM data and asked about suspicious edits. Any edits in OSM go live immediately without review.

I feel like this is where there could be some improvements. It would be quite nice to allow a review process to be setup for some types of edits. Plenty of examples in the market to get inspiration from.

In many areas there is zero or just one local mapper.

And vandalism and malicious editing remains rare.

That would be enormous effort for minimal benefit.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#176

This article is just factually wrong. It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while. If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for electi…

Right, and I'm rather concerned that this be taken as representative of the OSM UK community.

Also, it seems pretty easy to add something in the Organic Maps app (né maps.me), for instance, not that I use that for mapping.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#178

> Microsoft Bing uses OSM in several regions, and is slowly moving from it’s traditional providers to OSM globally. They provide machine-learning (ML) datasets that they have computed from areal imagery. They employ nobody in the OSM community. Microsoft Bing made its aerial imagery available for OSM editing, this is often very very very useful for mapping (speaking from own experience as an OSM mapper). See https://…

Not news to Mateusz, but Microsoft also provide some "streetside" imagery, and there are other imagery providers, like ESRI (lower resolution, but typically more up-to-date and better aligned where I've used it).

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#179

> It may be mainly made by individuals in there spare time, but the big tech companies are making millions of it. Dude please proof read. I walk into an article making a statement and the very second sentence has errors like this, you're losing credibility. > They are reasonably good at fixing and contributing data to OSM in those regions. They employ nobody in the OSM community. Except whoever contributes data to OS…

> Dude please proof read. I walk into an article making a statement and the very second sentence has errors like this, you're losing credibility. Your first sentence has punctuation errors, and your second sentence it littered with grammatical errors...

Deliberate, nuance. To get my point across articulated with my sentiment and attitude about what I'm saying. A similar approach to the cultural context included in colloquial dialects. A far cry away from "there" instead of "their" and "of" instead of "off."
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