41–50 of 141 posts
From a navigation standpoint the devil is in the details, like flow speeds and turn restrictions, which is where we see the majority of our issues (flow speeds significantly impact how you treat traffic and turn restrictions of course impact routing).
I contribute from time to time to OSM. What bothers me a bit is my productivity when doing surveys with my phone and OSMTracker. The GPS is not precise enough to record doors locations precisely, and taking photos is time consuming (I feel quite productive when tracing roads against satellite views using JOSM, though). I can imagine that Google's stack (with their Google cars and adapted home-grown software) must be…
It looked extremely good. For example they automatically extract signs from streetview and overlay them on the map. They also had a kind of fast streetview fisheye thing. Hard to describe but it looked excellent.
As a regular data contributor for Openstreetmap: Openstreetmap is terribly broken in many many ways. There's no regular checkup of the data if it's still valid. Reverting is extremely hard and there are no checks for changing the data. The multipolygon model for areas can be extremely complex and is the cause that many regions aren't touched at all anymore. In many regions it's just an import desert where already ope…
The only thing OSM is missing is a good open places database
As a regular data contributor for Openstreetmap: Openstreetmap is terribly broken in many many ways. There's no regular checkup of the data if it's still valid. Reverting is extremely hard and there are no checks for changing the data. The multipolygon model for areas can be extremely complex and is the cause that many regions aren't touched at all anymore. In many regions it's just an import desert where already ope…
Let's take the first identified weakness: regular checkup of the data.
The easiest way to check this for highways is to run distance matrix calculations. Take 500 points in a given area, and calculate a distance matrix from them (OSRM makes this trivial: https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/). Store the result.
The next day, rerun the same matrix on the latest data. Compare the result against yesterday. If anything has changed significantly, the data has either been broken or improved. Flag this up so that it can be reviewed.
Repeat ad infinitum.
A really simple task for someone with the time and hardware, and it'd make a big difference to OSM. I don't got the time myself, but am happy to help/advise anyone who'd like to take it on.
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I've been trying to learn the world of GIS for a cycling/pedestrian project I've been working on over the last few months. I'm also working with the local Open Data/Open Government groups. As I've gotten to know the communities I've seen this over and over...even in the Open Data groups. I've come to the conclusion that it's not malicious (or even 'Not Invented Here' syndrome), but ignorance and a complete misunderst…
One thing that I've found really helps with this is saying that OSM is "like Wikipedia for maps". These days most people understand what Wikipedia is, how it works, and trust the content. OSM really is like a cartographic Wikipedia...
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I was actually surprised recently to find out that GPS works in airplane mode. Really fun to see what landmarks you're flying over when you see something cool out the airplane window.
Wi-Fi also does works in airplane mode, on Android at least...