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CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

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Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#151

Post by baumschubser »

maelito wrote: post #104
tcfhgj wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is very hard to reproduce is Google's place review data. fake anyways (quite easy to get negative comments deleted), and even for bad reviews. Best look elsewhere or not at all.

I'm not talking about stars, we don't care about stars for search engines. What's important is people talking about "has air conditioner" in a hotel review or "has vegan" in a restaurant. OSM has none of this data.

I just checked (in CoMaps): A restaurant around the corner is listed as "Pizza, Vegan, no wheelchair access, outdoor seating". No opening hours, though (but other places have).

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#152

Post by throwaway284534 »

Groxx wrote: post #52

One of the main things that keeps me from using essentially all OSM-based mapping apps as my primary is that search seems incredibly bad. I can't blend city and name, road and category, can't usually filter by features or open time, and results are almost always something like: - a result 500 feet away that sounds nothing like what you searched for - a result 23 miles away that shares one word but nothing else - a re…

Search is a really tough problem in OSM for a few reasons, but I think a lot it stems from bad address parsing.

I’ve been working on geocoder which uses a trained model to parse and classify address queries into a tokenized form. In addition to being more accurate than traditional rule-based parsing, this approach also gives the search engine more to work with beyond the tokenized boundaries of each word. The model also attaches provenance annotations to the address components, allowing the geocoder to have a better understanding of the geographic hierarchy of the components makes sense, rather than matching a string in a database.

The code is changing fast but you can try it out entirely in your browser here! Let me know if you’d like to see any specific features not on the roadmap :)

https://mailwoman.sister.software/

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#153

Post by pietervdvn »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #108
Cider9986 wrote: post #12

I use CoMaps, it works great. You get notified in the app to download the updated maps you selected every 2 weeks or so. Could be wildly different than that, just what I notice. It's timing estimates are often 5-15 minutes off Apple Maps, which I find accurate, on ~two hour drives, but I imagine it depends on the traffic. To improve OpenStreetMap, which CoMaps uses as the data source, I use StreetComplete[1]–it puts…

Very interesting. Can the Street Complete be used to improve accessibility of a region, say to mark the availability of a ramp?

If you want to do more advanced accessibility mapping, also have a look at https://mapcomplete.org/onwheels - same concept, but different implementation. Also OpenStreetMap based, so data you add there is shared amongst CoMaps, StreetComplete, ...

Disclaimer: I make this

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#154

Post by pietervdvn »

thiagowfx wrote: post #138
Cider9986 wrote: post #12

I use CoMaps, it works great. You get notified in the app to download the updated maps you selected every 2 weeks or so. Could be wildly different than that, just what I notice. It's timing estimates are often 5-15 minutes off Apple Maps, which I find accurate, on ~two hour drives, but I imagine it depends on the traffic. To improve OpenStreetMap, which CoMaps uses as the data source, I use StreetComplete[1]–it puts…

Are you aware of any app comparable to StreetComplete for iOS?

You can use a different, webbased one: https://mapcomplete.org

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#155

Post by pietervdvn »

einpoklum wrote: post #131
nodifference wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, after you intentionally leaked the map generation code (which was not intended to be published) before creating the fork, it's not surprising that OM banned you. How do your actions align with governance, transparency, community and values?

What do you mean, leaked? Isn't this a FOSS project? Why would it have secret code? Also "not surprising that OM banned you" - what process of adjudication was there before the project decided to ban someone who, by his description at least, is a key contributor? How was this person found guilty, and who decided on the penalty? --- PS - I'm not involved with any of OM, CoMaps, Maps.ME, and actually just found out the…

Not involved in OM or CoMaps at all; but involved in OpenStreetMap.

> What do you mean, leaked? Isn't this a FOSS project?

The client-app (CoMaps/Organic Maps) indeed is fully FLOSS. It uses OSM data, but that data is packaged into a specific and optimized format. The code _generating_ this optimized data (and serving it to the clients) was kept proprietary.

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#156

Post by motoroco »

wlesieutre wrote: post #21
ButlerianJihad wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As great as Waze and Google Maps are for dynamic routing and responsive path-finding, I am using rental scooters now, and at this point I really need to design some bicycle routes with intention and purpose, and Maps simply refuses to save any "dragged" or "pinned" route in any meaningful way, and I suppose this is deliberate, because A.I. knows best, kids!

Even for driving the major apps are crappy about routes. I was on Foothills Parkway a while ago and wanted to keep Apple Maps running just as a "miles/time remaining" indicator. It can't do anything other than fastest route, with the option to ignore highways. So unless you set a waypoint halfway between every single entry/exit, it will want to get off the parkway and take US 321 instead. You can manually set up the…

I had the same issue planning roadtrips where the journey is the destination. I’ve paid for apps like InRoute despite poor UX, inability to access my routes from desktop, and zero collaboration support

I got increasingly frustrated looking for a replacement that I made https://plotalong.app in my spare time so that my wife and I could plan and save our motorcycle trips together. We still have to add the occasional “via” waypoint but it’s leagues better than Google maps at sticking to the scenic route

I need to update the marketing site and get new users into the map faster, but if you want a quick way in here’s an actual trip I took last year and spruced up to serve as a demo https://plotalong.app/maps/5c735b43-cb84-5a7b-8976-2d4e0c383...

New features and improvements come out regularly so if you have any suggestions send me a message

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#157

Post by pastk »

nodifference wrote: post #130
pastk wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> made by... "community"? We don't even know who that is, original developers and people with experience are not involved. FYI I've been the most active non-shareholder contributor of Organic Maps for 3+ years. Though you won't see me (or other ex-OM contributors who've left to start CoMaps) in OM github contributor stats anymore, because OM had banned us (and nowadays they also ban users in their chats and SM accoun…

Well, after you intentionally leaked the map generation code (which was not intended to be published) before creating the fork, it's not surprising that OM banned you. How do your actions align with governance, transparency, community and values?

> you intentionally leaked the map generation code (which was not intended to be published)

In short:

It was perfectly legal to publish this code (Apache 2.0 repo and DCO signed agreeing its a public contribution) and OM shareholders have always claimed that the map generator code is open and people are free to fork it.

However it turned out they were holding back a bunch of commits to prevent people from easily forking the project while maintaining still that the commits are FOSS and will be eventually pushed to the main repo, its just they're "experimental" still (but in fact they had been used in prod for a few years already).

We made an agreement to fix this discrepancy and push the commits to the public repo, so that we can honestly state that Organic Maps is truly an open source project with no tricks and reservations. This has happened several months before the conflict between the shareholders and community contributors.

And indeed a good part of the commits had been pushed public during next months. And when I published the rest of the commits OM shareholders knew about it of course and again they didn't say anything against it.

However after about a month (after negotiations to improve OM governance has failed and ex-contributors, me included, have started CoMaps) they have started accusing me of "stealing" those commits.

If you're interested in more details then please refer to https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/organic-maps-open-lett...

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#158

Post by pietervdvn »

wraptile wrote: post #83

What FOSS maps need is user generated content. For example, having "swimming spot" on my map is not really that useful - it needs photos, some description, additional information of what it actually is and how to reach it as bare minimum to be actually competitive. OSM argues that it's a "map database" but it stores labels like "opening hours" and "social media links" - why stop there? The UGC vs non-UGC debate has b…

The OSM foundation strictly keeps it with 'map data'. There are however many other, small projects that fill in the gap; for example 'Panoramax' for streetview imagery or lib.reviews for reviews. I've made a webapp that ties those services together (https://mapcomplete.org)

Keep in mind that Google Maps has a >1 billion yearly budget (citation needed, but other global maps have similar budgets)

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#159

Post by pietervdvn »

wraptile wrote: post #87
szszrk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. Open maps don't have to compete in this space and it would make them worse. Yes, that is something google maps excels in. Absolutely. But trying to compete here would mean they have to shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation. There are some intermediate options here. Osmand integrates Mapilary images (I'm not a fan personally), they have travel guides…

> shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation. I really don't buy this argument. You already have to moderate submissions - what's an extra field? Sure, UGC is more opinionated but just don't add star ratings and anything that promotes gaming of system. Just let users expand the dataset with more information, it's almost never a bad idea - isn't that entire point of crowdsourc…

The big difference is visibility and scale.

Sure, a 'description' or 'name' tag can contain something inappropriate (like a slur of defamation). If it has high impact, it'll be reverted quickly. If it has little impact, not a big deal. Many tools don't even show the 'description' tag

Pictures are a whole other level. You need to blur faces and license plates. What if someones house is photographed? How to detect inappropriate images? Should one study the laws of all countries? Even the freedom of panorama contains many differences between European countries, let alone privacy rights, ...

Re: CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

#160

Post by pietervdvn »

kreco wrote: post #115

Sorry for the slight off-topic: Is there any standard protocol/format for "layers" that could be added to such Map apps? Let's say I want to write a plugin to add my own kind of data, and then I want to export this new kind of data so that someone can import them. Or I want to create a website with my own data on top of existing one.

This is all OSM-based. OSM is one big pile of data - we don't do layers.

It is also best to add it directly into OSM, importing data afterwards is tricky.

My talk at Why25 should be a good intro (https://media.ccc.de/v/why2025-198-openstreetmap-for-beginne...), but the OSM-wiki also contains some valuable sources: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tags , https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_features

There are also various libraries to show OSM as background map on a website and allow you to draw features on top. Those support various formats (GPX, GeoJSON, ...) Leaflet and MapLibre are the biggest here, with leaflet being the easiest and MapLibre being very flexible and performant

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