OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#11

Post by donquichotte » Tue, Oct 20, 2015, 3:29 PM UTC

privong wrote: post #7

donquichotte wrote: post #3

When I was traveling overland in central Asia, everybody I met was using maps.me with OSM. The maps were of surprisingly good quality and maps.me is superb, allowing the maps for whole countries to be downloaded (ideal if you don't have a data plan) and the route calculation is quick as long as the road grid isn't too dense.

I have been using it in Chile for over a year now and it has been working great. When I arrived, multiple people told me that Google Maps was terrible here, but I have had good luck with OSM.

Yeah, the quality of google maps quickly deteriorates once you leave the highly developed countries. It would be nice to have tighter integration of maps.me with OSM, e.g. to be able to make changes to the maps from the maps.me app. I wanted to remove several abandoned hotels/fuel stations, but in the end just didn't do it because editing OSM is quite tedious.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#12

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Oct 20, 2015, 3:32 PM UTC

vtcraghead wrote: post #10

oulipo wrote: post #4

The only thing OSM is missing is a good open places database

If this is what you're referring to, we're getting there: http://openaddresses.io/

"Places" usually means something like Foursquare.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#13

Post by zoidb » Tue, Oct 20, 2015, 3:34 PM UTC

jusuchin wrote: post #6

I recently used maps.me while in Europe (Germany and Poland), with no data plan and only GPS on Airplane mode. With the downloaded maps, it was great. It even included entertainment, restaurants and some transportation options.

I discovered it recently as well, also it's pretty snappy due to the offline data.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#14

Post by cossatot » Tue, Oct 20, 2015, 3:41 PM UTC

I'm a big fan of OSM, but I have to say that for my purposes (more geological than anthropocentric), QGIS becoming more functional over the past 5 years has been more important, especially after going independent. Similar to Python overtaking MATLAB in utility and likely eventual adoption, I think QGIS (esp. with improving OSM/python/JS support) will become the new standard for GIS outside of the mega-enterprise/private data world where ESRI is focusing.

It's really nice watching the confluence of open source technologies making a bigger and more powerful wave.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#15

Post by Cyph0n » Tue, Oct 20, 2015, 3:46 PM UTC

cossatot wrote: post #14

I'm a big fan of OSM, but I have to say that for my purposes (more geological than anthropocentric), QGIS becoming more functional over the past 5 years has been more important, especially after going independent. Similar to Python overtaking MATLAB in utility and likely eventual adoption, I think QGIS (esp. with improving OSM/python/JS support) will become the new standard for GIS outside of the mega-enterprise/priv…

Yeah, I recently had to use some basic GIS to implement custom reverse geocoding functionality for my college senior project. My workflow looked like this:

- Get map data from OSM

- Use QGIS for analysis, feature extraction -> export as GeoJSON

- Write GeoJSON to MongoDB instance

Geolocation "works" out of the box thanks to Mongo's geospatial queries and the MongoDB client for Node. Overall, it was an extremely smooth experience, and involved the use of open-source tools from start to finish. This would have probably been impossible to do for free even just a few years back.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#16

Post by krasin » Tue, Oct 20, 2015, 3:50 PM UTC

donquichotte wrote: post #3

When I was traveling overland in central Asia, everybody I met was using maps.me with OSM. The maps were of surprisingly good quality and maps.me is superb, allowing the maps for whole countries to be downloaded (ideal if you don't have a data plan) and the route calculation is quick as long as the road grid isn't too dense.

For those who may have missed, maps.me is also gone open-source recently: https://github.com/mapsme/omim

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#17

Post by ascorbic » Tue, Oct 20, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

OSM is great of course, but it's a bit of a stretch to say it's more important in geo than GPS.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#18

Post by reustle » Tue, Oct 20, 2015, 3:59 PM UTC

vtcraghead wrote: post #10

oulipo wrote: post #4

The only thing OSM is missing is a good open places database

If this is what you're referring to, we're getting there: http://openaddresses.io/

Wow, they've really got Japan covered

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#19

Post by jarek » Tue, Oct 20, 2015, 4:01 PM UTC

donquichotte wrote: post #11

privong wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using it in Chile for over a year now and it has been working great. When I arrived, multiple people told me that Google Maps was terrible here, but I have had good luck with OSM.

Yeah, the quality of google maps quickly deteriorates once you leave the highly developed countries. It would be nice to have tighter integration of maps.me with OSM, e.g. to be able to make changes to the maps from the maps.me app. I wanted to remove several abandoned hotels/fuel stations, but in the end just didn't do it because editing OSM is quite tedious.

A somewhat hacky thing you can do is tweet to @OSMthis with the location embedded in the tweet, and it will add a note to OSM: https://twitter.com/osmthis/with_replies

Other editors can then see the note and might resolve it

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#20

Post by meatysnapper » Tue, Oct 20, 2015, 4:04 PM UTC

Google maps on the web and on mobile has become such a miserably bad experience that I hope OSM wins big. Google's data is not bad, but the apps are awful.