141–150 of 252 posts
Lyft has access to some pretty good data on where the roads actually are and if there are any closures. Looks like they are already contributing back, which is awesome. Something I've never heard being done, but could be very helpful for cities, is tracking the bumpiness of roads as a metric for road quality. The city could have near real time access to information on where the potholes are. I'd think they'd be willi…
Are there companies that fund employees to work on Open Street Maps?
I've been looking to replace Google Maps with OSM on my smartphone. OSM itself is great, but I've been having a harder time finding a good app to use it with. Is anyone familiar with a good option? I mostly use a maps app for location searches and real-time GPS navigation, but offline maps and location sharing are nice-to-have features. I've been using OsmAnd and it's okay. The interface is pretty good. It supports o…
I'm using an app called Maps.Me, which seems to be OSM-based. It's kind of commercialized, which I don't like, but it's usable. I'd be interested in something more FOSSy, myself.
As Google has lost it's sheen of benevolence over the last decade public knowledge projects like this become ever more appealing. Wikipedia proves they can be wildly successful all without capital investment and the perverse incentives that follow.
The data in OSM is pretty good but there are no apps for it that are actually good other than leaflet JS for embedding on sites.
Have to remember that a maps app is way more than just data. Its efficient routing, its good text to speach, its pulling in data from multiple sources like the gps location of the bus I'm waiting for or the roads closed for construction currently.
You would also need a whole bunch of heuristics for the OSM dataset that the current apps don't have. OsmAnd would not be able to tell the difference between the turning lane on an intersection and an entire road that just has no name because the way the data is entered is there is just an unamed path joining the roads so the text to speach would say "bear slightly left" instead of "turn right on to foo street".
Lyft has access to some pretty good data on where the roads actually are and if there are any closures. Looks like they are already contributing back, which is awesome. Something I've never heard being done, but could be very helpful for cities, is tracking the bumpiness of roads as a metric for road quality. The city could have near real time access to information on where the potholes are. I'd think they'd be willi…
The wiki states that this data type is being proposed: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Surfac...
Thats one of the big issues with OSM though, they have an attitude of "Thats not my problem, it should go in another dataset" but then no one actually has an alternative place to put it so users just miss out.
On the other hand, I wonder if OSM's accuracy in Europe has taken a hit in the last year. The lockdowns have led to a wave of bankruptcies of restaurants and fitness centers in several countries, but because mappers are forced to stay home and aren't circulating in the city doing their business, they aren't noticing so much what has changed and removing those POIs from the map. Also, the extremely strict lockdowns in…
As Google has lost it's sheen of benevolence over the last decade public knowledge projects like this become ever more appealing. Wikipedia proves they can be wildly successful all without capital investment and the perverse incentives that follow.
Wikipedia shows that average people are pretty good at assembling data. The problem is drive by contributors are not very good at developing software. Wikipedia is super basic software wise while GIS and everything around it is extremely complex. The data in OSM is pretty good but there are no apps for it that are actually good other than leaflet JS for embedding on sites. Have to remember that a maps app is way more…
Agreed.
> Its efficient routing,
This is a hard one especially for long routes when calculated on a phone rather than on a server.
> its good text to speach,
Ummmm. Text-to-speech is almost always provided by the OS rather than the app.
> its pulling in data from multiple sources like the gps location of the bus I'm waiting for
There are surprisingly good apps for bus navigation using OSM in some parts of the world. Unfortunately, where I live, bus companies seem to "license" that data only to Google.
> or the roads closed for construction currently.
This is literally part of the OSM dataset.
> You would also need a whole bunch of heuristics for the OSM dataset that the current apps don't have. OsmAnd would not be able to tell the difference between the turning lane on an intersection and an entire road that just has no name because the way the data is entered is there is just an unamed path joining the roads so the text to speach would say "bear slightly left" instead of "turn right on to foo street".
Rather than "heuristics for the OSM dataset", we generally need a more complete dataset. A "turning lane on an intersection" and an "entire road that just has no name" should be mapped differently. The turning lane will probably be mapped as a "link" type road with a "destination:street" of the road that it is going to (if it is mapped as a separate road at all). The generic no-name street will be mapped as a road with "noname" (yes, there is a special tag for this). Further, in many cases, a "turning lane" will be mapped with the "turn:lanes" tag on a road leaving no room for confusion with generic unnamed roads.
I will admit that in current mapping in many places you will often get "bear slightly left" rather than "turn right on to foo street". However, this is almost always caused by a (current) lack of completeness in the data rather than a need to create some sort of set of heuristics to figure out what is "actually" going on.
I think the hardest part for a good maps app that you did not mention is search. Searching in OsmAnd (offline) is abysmal. In fact it is worse than that. It is so bad that I will switch to a web browser, search on DDG, open a link in GMaps, find the coordinates and copy them to OsmAnd for routing because I know Osmand search does not have a snowball's chance in h** of remotely finding what I want in any sane manner.
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OSM isn't perfect--especially on trails that aren't official in any way. (Although there are some totally informal trails literally out my door that are far better than you could reasonably expect. And the missing sections are probably on private land which is one reason I haven't filled them in.) But Google seems to have pretty much zero interest in mapping even popular official trails in many cases.
Nothing is perfect, not even official paper maps. I remember a hike we did on holiday in the Drôme department of France when I was a little kid, long before OSM or Google Maps or even Microsoft's Terraserver. Must have been somewhere in the mid to late 80's, I think. We did have a paper map though, and I think it was an official topographic map. We started in one valley and the plan was to hike up the ridge and then…
OpenStreetMap with the traditional topographic view. But I was not able to find where you wanted to hike to see the Tour de France.
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Is there an easy way to contribute from my phone? If I could just turn the GPS on and let it track my path I’d be able to contribute all of my random hikes that might not be on OSM.
I quite like that interactive website that helps visitors choose a mapping tool: https://whatosm.pavie.info/ It asks the difficulty level, time you'd like to spend, and whether you want to map at home or on the terrain.