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Openstreetmap is having a moment

joemorrison.medium.com

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Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#51

Post by walrus01 »

folli wrote: post #49
walrus01 wrote: post #31

I'd like to add a note here that fully self hosted openstreetmap is a powerful tool. The vector graphic data sets exist freely for anyone to mirror for their own use. The full tool chain of software needed to build your own tile server is available and not very difficult to implement. I'm aware of more than one ISP using openstreetmap for NOC monitoring of outages, individual customer premises endpoint status, and so…

Any good tutorials on this? What are the required specs? I assume the dataset is huge?

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_Map

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Deploying_your_own_Slipp...

https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/

It's small enough that I have a self hosted test tile server in my home office with about 8TB of storage, on a WD hard drive that was shucked out of a USB3 enclosure.

https://medium.com/gowombat/self-hosted-open-source-cheap-al...

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#52

Post by Havoc »

Love it. I hope they make their tile servers a little more torrent like.

I'd love to chip in but the requirements are just out of my league.

Symetrical gigabit sure...but 30TB a month. Don't think my ISP is buying that as residential use.

So I'll just stick to seeding linux ISOs...

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#53

Post by sushshshsh »

walrus01 wrote: post #25
sushshshsh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet is the birth place and death place of lots of people's hopes and dreams for making humanity better :)

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 In 2004 when that was published it had already been true since, in my opinion, at least 1996...

Ahhahah, yes I completely agree, the moment my opinions are even plausibly associated to my name and people are watching, then I become the politest person possible

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#54

Post by matli »

adrianb wrote: post #50

It's interesting that all the big tech companies except Google are invested in OSM, but at the same time none of them bought one of the classic, "traditional" digital map makers - Here Maps formerly Nokia, formerly NavTeq and TomTom formerly TeleAtlas. They would certainly have the budget so I wonder why they weren't interested? Do they think it's better to pool their resources into one digital map data source? Are t…

One of the issues for the traditional map makers is their ability to keep up with updates. It requires a massive infrastructure to quickly discover and submit all the small changes that goes on in the real world all the time. One of the few viable ways is crowdsourcing. So over time, the traditional maps degrades in quality, while OSM continuously gets better.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#55

Post by rathel »

Paul-ish wrote: post #47

There's still low hanging fruit in OSM. There are still areas with official government GIS data that hasn't been imported to OSM. For example Irvine County in CA. I wanted to try it but I don't have the GIS skills. It would be nice if someone created a tutorial to teach the bare minimum GIS skills to do an import that is up to OSM standards. Importing whole counties would be a huge boost.

Skills are not a real barrier. Data quality and license are. When you look at official datasets, you find ways to screw up you never thought were possible

People in USA still complain about the botched TIGER import [1].

It may sound flippant, but I'd rather not have such end-to-end tutorial geared towards imports be made. It'd lower the barrier too much. People who self-taught GIS (it's possible) can be trusted to be marginally more responsible (not fully, though).

[1] TL;DR the OSM road networks in USA was initially imported from TIGER dataset. However the importing mappers didn't know TIGER was being updated, state by state. Hence, the quality of imported data is not great in many places.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#56

Post by matli »

rayrag wrote: post #17

I have questions about OSM: 1. Is there any decent OSM app for Windows10 (good UI and offline capabilities is a must-have) 2. How can I display Russian/Chinese/Arabic city names in English? 3. If I create an OSM account will I be able to save routes and addresses? Edit: Thanks for answers.

I believe a common misconception about OSM (which is also somewhat reflected in the article) is that it "is" the map on osm.org. Actually the main OSM "product" is the map database, which can for example be used for drawing maps, as is demonstrated on osm.org.

Creating maps or apps where you can customise display, save routes etc is really up to other players.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#57

Post by sanguy »

adrianb wrote: post #50

It's interesting that all the big tech companies except Google are invested in OSM, but at the same time none of them bought one of the classic, "traditional" digital map makers - Here Maps formerly Nokia, formerly NavTeq and TomTom formerly TeleAtlas. They would certainly have the budget so I wonder why they weren't interested? Do they think it's better to pool their resources into one digital map data source? Are t…

Apple a couple years ago added 16,000 employees in India for its map "update" group - I bet it's pretty easy to guess what they were doing isn't it?

That was a far better investment versus buying a relic from the propreitary vehicle navigation data era who are still surviving selling yearly DVD updates and wondering when the last of their cheese will vanish.....

CarPlay and Android Auto have decimated that business - from a captive reoccurring business model to being completely decimated and gutted. It's another Blockbuster-esque lesson in getting displaced before you know you are being displaced. The smartphone is now your navigation device.

Note: NavTeq, HERE, TomTom, Garmin survivor.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#58

Post by jdeibele »

CameronNemo wrote: post #45
joejoebags wrote: post #23

Hello, HN. On the rare occasion my writing has appeared on the front page, the tone of some anonymous commenters has left me feeling indignant. Last time, someone called me a dog. Please keep in mind that a fellow human wrote this piece! You don't have to be nice, but at least be constructive.

Hi. I didn't read this. I don't go on medium.com. please consider another content distribution method.

I did read it. But Medium.com doesn't seem to support RSS feeds at all. I would have liked to add a feed for your articles so I could read them even when they don't make the front page of HN.

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#59

Post by tppiotrowski »

It seems that tile hosting is a large business. Apple, Mapbox, Mapzen, Google? all offer free tiers for their tiles that cost big $$$$ once you go over the limit.

I have thought about making a generic API for centering a map, adding a marker, etc that would map (pun intended) the instructions onto the respective JS Api (Mapbox.js, MapKit JS, ...) allowing you to rotate between the services on each page load as to not exhaust the free tier as fast.

You'll get a slightly different UI each time, but I think people generally know how to use a slippy map.

Does this exist? Is anyone interested in something like this?

Re: Openstreetmap is having a moment

#60

Post by dmitriid »

samcrawford wrote: post #40

After I did a Show HN about my OSM-powered project ( https://trailrouter.com ), I saw first hand a little of the positive impact of large corporate involvement in OSM. Two of the very large companies mentioned in the article got in touch with me to find out what what could be done to improve the state of data in OSM useful for pedestrian routing. They were conscious that a disproportionate amount of effort went into…

> After I did a Show HN about my OSM-powered project (https://trailrouter.com),

This is just amazing! I immediately bookmarked and sent it to friends. But I'm not a runner myself, I prefer bikes :) Do you perchance know of something similar for bikes?

Though in Sweden, where I live right now, Trail Router would work very well for bikes, too, especially outside cities.

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