Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

blog.emacsen.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 290 posts

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#251

Post by yellowbkpk »

maxerickson wrote: post #192
btilly wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's the opposite of what we are looking for. We're not looking for data that other people have uploaded. We've got that data straight from the companies before it is publicly announced. We're publishing it to everywhere the companies want it published to. OSM is not one of the places that we want to deal with providing that data to.

If you hand alltheplaces your data, people ingesting alltheplaces will have your data. I was suggesting it as an alternative open distribution channel that was less concerned with details.

Hello. I am the creator of alltheplaces and Max is absolutely correct. Alltheplaces is a bunch of scrapers right now because it was the fastest way to get the data, but if you have data in a machine readable format already then I don't have to scrape it. I can just download your data file and distribute it to whomever wants to use it (people interested in importing to OSM, geocoders/search engines, etc.).

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#252

Post by momo14 »

pbowyer wrote: post #108
andrewljohnson wrote: post #18

This 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…

Check out the overpass " rel="nofollow">https://overpass-turbo.eu>. You should be able to query for the data you are looking for.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#253

Post by emj »

sgc wrote: post #202
maxerickson wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of governments restrict use of their address data. Address coverage in OSM in general isn't great. There are regions that are good and then regions where there basically aren't addresses.

I am certainly not an expert on international data access regulations. But at the same time, there is more than enough of that information publicly available to make it a basic first step in a mapping application/dataset.

Open address has a good map that show this (http://results.openaddresses.io/), but for any area that is grey on that map you are going to be a long way from that "basic first step" you talk about. Adress data is hard, there are so many shitty collections with bad licenses.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#254

Post by emj »

btilly wrote: post #190
maxerickson wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alltheplaces is almost what you are looking for. https://github.com/alltheplaces/alltheplaces I guess you'd be looking to bypass the hard part.

No, that's the opposite of what we are looking for. We're not looking for data that other people have uploaded. We've got that data straight from the companies before it is publicly announced. We're publishing it to everywhere the companies want it published to. OSM is not one of the places that we want to deal with providing that data to.

Comming from the other side I've dealt with a lot of companies trying to use Openstreetmap, and they are all really bad at it. Two things I say to everyone who want to import data to Openstreetmap. These seems to be very hard things for people to manage, do you have any idea why that would be?

1. just make it available for everyone to download, try to add as much metadata as possible.

2. make it clear what kind of license you have for this data

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#255

Post by cptskippy »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #18

This 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.

Isn't all of the data in OSM transient to some degree?

What's the threshold for when data is too fleeting to be worth storing? Days, months, years, decades?

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#256

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

iamdave wrote: post #222
voltagex_ wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is KMZ really still the best way to go?

Good question. I'm only a hobbyist with GIS, so I can't really say or speak to how practical of a format KML/KMZ are in production. But that's a really good question.

I work in GIS.

KML/KMZ is decently useful as an interchange format and simple rendering but almost all web GIS software has better support for GeoJSON. It’s richer and easier to work with.

I’ve never worked on a GIS system that used KML/KMZ in prod for rendering. It’s usually shapefiles, PostGIS Geometry, ESRI’s proprietary GDB feature, WKB/WKT or GeoJSON on the backend being served up to clients.

I have used it as a lightweight way to deliver simple data in the past though for use cases where there was no proper client renderer (we would just tell the end user to download google earth and open up the file)

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#257

Post by Avamander »

lucb1e wrote: post #92
Avamander wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, maybe everyone doesn't want to use that software?

You want to write your own routing software from scratch, or are you talking about using vector data for research purposes?

It shouldn't really matter if I want to use it with some other application on Android or to test some routing libraries, the point is that it's not easy to get.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#258

Post by ultim8k »

I personally believe that world needs a "wikipedia" for maps, not another hard to understand tool or technology. Yes. Technology matters of course, but not everyone is an engineer or entrepreneur.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#259

Post by Piskvorrr »

laaph wrote: post #233
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The API returns only nodes entirely within an area, rather than everything intersecting a given area. The osm.org API is meant for editing. It's not a map rendering and querying API. There are lots of alternatives for that. > There was free building data available for areas I was interested in, but I was told to copy them by hand. OSM is open to imported data. It just has to be done carefully because "with great po…

Can you clarify which API I should be using for data access? My last project involved determining locations parks and rivers, and I ran in to a lot of the same problems. But, if I just want GPS coordinates, I'm not sure where else to go. Mapbox is find for rendering but less so if I want the raw data and use it myself (for a phone application for example).

Overpass?

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#260

Post by dvdkon »

pbowyer wrote: post #108
andrewljohnson wrote: post #18

This 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…

I'm currently doing something very similar for my school project and it's been quite a journey, the OSM ecosystem sure isn't simple.

My current solution is based on OpenMapTiles and uses their stack for creating, and subsequently rendering, vector tiles. First, I obtain an extract of OSM data via the Overpass API. Then I convert it from XML to protobuf, as it's a much more efficient format. Afterwards I import it into a PostGIS database using imposm3 and define some SQL functions that transform that data. Then I generate some vector tile definition from the OMT format into tm2source format. After that I finally generate the vector tiles in mbtiles format using tilelive, server them as GeoJSON using tileserver-gl and style them using maputnik and mapbox-gl styles.

There seems to be some bug with imposm3 and relations, because I can't get them to import. Or I'm just not doing it right.

Post reply on HN