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OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
141–150 of 290 posts
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#142This post seems half right, half wrong. Wrong that OSM should be a service provider and not a database - I think it should be a database, and corporations are good for OSM. The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox. It's insanely expensive to be Mapbox, and Mapzen just failed trying to be a less corporate version of Mapbox. And then the usage policy part of the article is moot or at least not that consequen…
> Probably right: OSM needs layers, or even a more sweeping re-architecture to allow better versioning, moderation, better tooling, and easier understanding of the data. I have a hobby site about railways [0] I'm picking up again after a decade of inactivity. I wanted to display a route map of each railway, with clickable stations and the route highlighted. I can not work out how to do that. OSM has the route and sta…
OSM is essentially a database of points and lines, each with a (loosely defined) soup of tags attached to it. Highly flexible (annoyingly so, if you've got a single focus area) and not in a "layer" format.
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#143This post seems half right, half wrong. Wrong that OSM should be a service provider and not a database - I think it should be a database, and corporations are good for OSM. The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox. It's insanely expensive to be Mapbox, and Mapzen just failed trying to be a less corporate version of Mapbox. And then the usage policy part of the article is moot or at least not that consequen…
> Probably right: OSM needs layers, or even a more sweeping re-architecture to allow better versioning, moderation, better tooling, and easier understanding of the data. I have a hobby site about railways [0] I'm picking up again after a decade of inactivity. I wanted to display a route map of each railway, with clickable stations and the route highlighted. I can not work out how to do that. OSM has the route and sta…
If the data is in OpenMapTiles, which are vector files from OSM data, you may have more success styling it in the browser.
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#144This post seems half right, half wrong. Wrong that OSM should be a service provider and not a database - I think it should be a database, and corporations are good for OSM. The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox. It's insanely expensive to be Mapbox, and Mapzen just failed trying to be a less corporate version of Mapbox. And then the usage policy part of the article is moot or at least not that consequen…
> Probably right: OSM needs layers, or even a more sweeping re-architecture to allow better versioning, moderation, better tooling, and easier understanding of the data. I have a hobby site about railways [0] I'm picking up again after a decade of inactivity. I wanted to display a route map of each railway, with clickable stations and the route highlighted. I can not work out how to do that. OSM has the route and sta…
In some sense there is a layer, features related to railways will all have a railway tag (or be listed as a member of one of those features). There's some description here:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Railways
In the sense of being easy to retrieve I guess it isn't a layer. Global railway data will be pretty huge, so Overpass-API may not work out if that is what you want. In that case, the strategy is to grab a planet file (a snapshot of the db) and filter it locally:
http://osmcode.org/osmium-tool/manual.html#filtering-by-tags
And then you probably have to translate the resulting data into a format that you would use for your map.
As to why you have to do that work instead of just pulling layers, it comes down to the core data model being focused on editing and there being many different end use cases (making it difficult to anticipate and serve each one).
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#145I've found that in terms of supporting any kind of additional analysis, OSM data to be unreliable to the point of uselessness, which isn't to say there is a better alternative. I think this quote from your article: "One of the most significant technical problems with OSM is the lack of a review model, that is for a change to the map to be staged and then reviewed before being applied. Not having this functionality ca…
As an occasional OSM editor, I wouldn't really feel good about moderation. My edits are limited basically to my home town (10.000 inhabitants, about 10 sq km) where I am adding unmapped roads (usually agricultural, sometimes new construction) that I "discover" while running. I started doing that simply because Runkeeper's website uses OSM and it was showing me running in the middle of nowhere, while there was actuall…
I used to work on user generated content in maps. Business vandalism is a big problem once you reach a certain scale. It's possible that OSM doesn't have this problem yet because it's not as valuable a target as Google/Apple/Bing. I'm not super familiar with what's available on OSM these days, but an unscrupulous locksmith might try to make competing locksmiths unreachable by moving their address to a distant location (locksmiths and taxi companies were notorious for attempted vandalism in the past).
Map additions are probably generally safe, although there are some spammy ones for various reasons. Map edits are basically all suspect because you never know when someone is trying to sabotage something.
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a) biggest company does not equal company with highest market cap Actually it does. Especially since you can have 1 billion in revenue by selling $10 dollar bills at $1 dollar. > b) having the biggest market cap is something thats good for their shareholder, and terrible for anyone else Whatever. > But yeah, do continue to praise your beloved highness. Irrational argument ad hominem.
Well, "biggest" can mean a number of different things but, given that this is an Internet comment board and not an audited financial report, market cap seems one perfectly reasonable measure.
Market cap would be a reasonable measure for "biggest public company".
It's an awful measure for "biggest company", since private companies have no market cap. This was discussed a while ago in relation to Saudi Aramco's potential partial IPO. Saudi Aramco is huge, much bigger than Apple, with no market cap.
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#147Here is my experience. I work for a company that syndicates location data for businesses. We had a couple of businesses that wanted to syndicate to OSM. It. Was. A. Nightmare. We have addresses for every store. We don't know where the building is. Any store we place is going to be easy to place on a street near the building. If you've not placed it inside of the strip mall on the right spot, other people delete it. A…
Are you complaining that OSM contributors rejected wrong or imprecise location data about your client’s stores? If you are, I would like you to also consider this from the point of view of (maybe volunteer) contributors who prefer less data but correct data in OSM. Maybe draw a parallel with Wikipedia where a page that is not up to the standards might be deleted. (Not a contributor to OSM myself, but I have helped th…
I think in this case his criticism is merited. There is plenty of open data for street addresses available, and almost certainly already in osm. Instead of linking the most basic form of physical site identification -- which is basically a legal data set maintained by governments -- to their data import functionality/process, they just refuse data. Sounds off to me.
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#148This post seems half right, half wrong. Wrong that OSM should be a service provider and not a database - I think it should be a database, and corporations are good for OSM. The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox. It's insanely expensive to be Mapbox, and Mapzen just failed trying to be a less corporate version of Mapbox. And then the usage policy part of the article is moot or at least not that consequen…
> Probably wrong: Expanding the scope of OpenStreetMap to include transient data. Too much other work to do, maybe later for this.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the whole domain, but if OSM would get layers, that would lead to better composability, then wouldn't the question of transient/frivolous data kinda become moot? The way I see it, in that scenario I could make and host my own whatever pokemon layer and OSM proper could provide the base layer, and then they could be easily merged at usage point; whereas based on the discussion now without layers you'd need to essentially make hard fork of the OSM data to make your own pokemon map?
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#149I remember just a few years ago, I got a new phone and was interested in replacing as many Google apps with OSS maps that I could. (K9 instead of Google's mail app, etc.) Naturally I turned to OSM instead of Google Maps. But I was really surprised by how strange and difficult it was to install and use. As the author mentioned, OSM itself doesn't have any apps, which is very confusing. After some research I figured ou…
What about OSMAnd for Android? https://osmand.net/
I've found OSMAnd quite buggy and temperamental, plus it heavily pushes you to the paid version if you want up to date maps (so you could effectively ending up paying a third party to access your own mapping work unreliably).
Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
The why doesn't Apple do what other companies and industries typically do in a situation where there is one dominant player? Get everyone else to join a single open solution and then start attacking Google for not being open with its maps. Get Microsoft, Tom Tom, Samsung - everyone else - to work on OSM. Right now, Apple is basically building the "Windows Phone" of map solutions, because it "wants to be different", a…
Because xkcd:927 It will never happen.
If it's to their advantage, it will happen. See the AV1 codec, which Apple joined along with other industry giants as an alternative to patent-encumbered video codecs.