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Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

high5apps.github.io

51–60 of 113 posts

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#51

I recently purchased some very rural land with a cabin that I put on AirBnB. The address is a different road than the driveway is and all the maps took drivers around 1 mile away with no way to find the actual driveway. I had to go through the process of fixing this on Google, Apple, and open street maps. OSM was by far the easiest and my updates propagated within minutes. Google was the second easiest but still took…

Another option for apple would have been to just wait for a few months. They are downstream of osm but updates are slow. Likely your "propagated within minutes" was misleading. Almost no app, certainly not a mainstream app your customers might use, is reading osm live. They're all days to months behind on periodic batch updates.

Months behind is not fair. Apps like Komoot, OSMAnd or CoMaps have monthly refresh cycles. Others are shorter and yes there are longer (mostly obscure) update cycles such as apple maps, Uber, https://transportnsw.info/

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#52
post #41
post #28

One thing to note: OSM edits are associated with your account. Do not use your regular user name, or people can easily identify where you live since people tends to edit nearby locations. If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.

There are much easier ways to identify the approximate neighborhood where most people live.

You can define a location of your choice in your profile for example.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#53

Is there any software that can take raw footage from 360deg cameras that are now sprolling, identify businesses without websites, opening hours etc, and pre-fill them? With the user only having to validate. A foot-carried google street car if you want.

sprolling

?

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#54
post #29
post #24

Don't make your first edit(s) around the place you live.

Any good reasons, why not do our first edits around the place you live ? Privacy issue ?

Most likely the parent was relating this to revealing where you live and the privacy aspects. Yes indeed one could figure out where I went for holidays by my OSM edits but then any FAAG or similar would know that already by any social media interaction I might have had during the holidays. My bigger OSM edits are rarely during the actual holidays but rather before or after.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#55
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast. I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to rev…

Isn’t that a door (haha) opened by our supreme new AI coding overlords: that now it’s possible to take the Every Door source code (it’s on Github), and throw it into a coding agent with the instruction to „improve without breaking functionality“, and with some iterations and human validation that yes, the UX is now indeed better, play the changes back with a PR?

I can improve the UI to my taste but if the maintainer doesn't have time/money to maintain a big ol vibe coded PR for some very opinionated change isn't going to do much.

That would appear to leave me with the choice of just using it for myself (lame) or I then have a public fork to maintain :(

If there's basically no shot of it getting up streamed I think I'd rather make something from scratch to suit my needs without the extras.

Anyway, I hope the AI overlords help us fund more maintainers soon!

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads). I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many be…

There's usually a reasonably clear consensus within a region or country. That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either. One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.

That's true, but the very feeling that I might be inputting things in a way that might have to be updated later kinda drained my motivation.

I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after.

But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#57

I started contributing to OSM recently after a bike trail was built near me. The arial imagery typically takes years to refresh around here so I walked it a few times to capture GPX tracks and then drew the new path. It was exciting to see my contribution percolate out to various apps that depend on OSM, and meanwhile Google and Apple have both ignored my edit suggestions and deny the path exists. So I have a fairly…

Every Door is pretty cool but for iOS I prefer GoMaps more.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#58

How does OSM prevent trolling or vandalism? Since many (most) courier companies rely on OSM for their database a bad "joke" could prove very frustrating to many people.

I once encountered a joke building that was so large, I remember in the magnitude of 500km2, that you couldn’t edit it in the web editor. You had to download a desktop application to delete it. It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.

Fortunately it's fairly easy to query the database for that kind of thing and a few editors periodically go through the most implausibly-sized common features, so anything too egregious will get noticed eventually.

The last time I saw a collection of "biggest objects" for various tags it was mostly things that were just subtly mistagged (e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree) rather than vandalism.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#59

> Do NOT use search results for social media profiles This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).

It's a dumb thing to do too. If you have a website, you control what it says. For a shop or restaurant it's totally fine to just show a nice photo with your name, opening hours, address, and contact details, and just link to whatever social media accounts and reservation/delivery ordering platform you use. It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in so…

I agree. If a business decided to only be on Facebook or Instagram, then they're choosing the path of hiding themselves from the open web. I wouldn't even bother to update their info on OSM.

Re: Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

#60
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot of areas the sidewalks and crosswalks aren't mapped even though they show up clearly on overhead imagery. I try to fill them in when I can, although this should probably be an AI task now.

It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads). I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many be…

At least in urban areas I've seen it's almost always better to define the sidewalks separately. The routing for pedestrians is often significantly different than for vehicles. This matters when the data is fed into Strava or Garmin for running routes.
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