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OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

gisdoctor.com

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Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#71

Post by mtmail »

Kankuro wrote: post #34

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…

Openvenues (search on github) is working on extracting addresses from web sites.

Scout (part of telenav) has a project to recognize traffic signs from free street view videos (dashcams, mapillary photos). Street lanea, exit signs on highway, companies are already working on that.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#72

Post by 1ris »

jdmichal wrote: post #49
awqrre wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wi-Fi also does works in airplane mode, on Android at least...

Your phone is not in airplane mode if it's making any kind of signal. You're just using Wi-Fi with the cellular modem disabled. Since GPS is only reading the satellite signals, it works fine.

The last time I was on a plane I was asked to turn on pairplane mode during take-off and the landing. I could use it in the air, there even was a (extremly expensive) GSM network. Can't remember if GPS works in Airplain mode, though. But I'd suspect it to do since GPS is only passive.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#73

Post by pekk »

c0nsumer wrote: post #5

I do a lot of mountain bike trail mapping work using OpenStreetMap, and it's really bugged me that more public-service mapping projects (eg: MTB Project) don't build on OSM. They all tend to instead build their own mapping set which requires stuff to be re-entered... It's kind of a pain.

This is by OSM policy, which wants an individual (in this case, you) inspecting everything. It isn't fair to blame public data sources for this. OSM policy makes it incredibly difficult to import data from public sources like this. OSM could change this, if they wanted to. If we want more high-quality data out there that integrates with public data sources, we should make it easy for them rather than putting barriers in front of them.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#74

Post by c0nsumer »

pekk wrote: post #73
c0nsumer wrote: post #5

I do a lot of mountain bike trail mapping work using OpenStreetMap, and it's really bugged me that more public-service mapping projects (eg: MTB Project) don't build on OSM. They all tend to instead build their own mapping set which requires stuff to be re-entered... It's kind of a pain.

This is by OSM policy, which wants an individual (in this case, you) inspecting everything. It isn't fair to blame public data sources for this. OSM policy makes it incredibly difficult to import data from public sources like this. OSM could change this, if they wanted to. If we want more high-quality data out there that integrates with public data sources, we should make it easy for them rather than putting barriers…

Sorry, but in this case I'm not talking about public (eg: gov't, et al) data sources. For most of the MTB trail guides out there (eg: MTB Project, Trail Forks) they ask users to submit trail data then they keep it locked up.

I'm particularly bothered by this in the case of MTB Project which works with IMBA, a non-profit, yet doesn't share the data back with the greater world.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#75

Post by icewater0 »

lallysingh wrote: post #2

It is awesome. Here's a docker image that'll serve as a tile server. Add a JS library (I use d3) and a OSM snapshot and go. https://github.com/geo-data/openstreetmap-tiles-docker Note: a bit finicky.

I was going to post a comment how I would like to have a local instance of OSM for my state/region.

Is it possible to calculate directions/routing locally too?

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#76

Post by DarkLinkXXXX »

donquichotte wrote: post #11
privong wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using it in Chile for over a year now and it has been working great. When I arrived, multiple people told me that Google Maps was terrible here, but I have had good luck with OSM.

Yeah, the quality of google maps quickly deteriorates once you leave the highly developed countries. It would be nice to have tighter integration of maps.me with OSM, e.g. to be able to make changes to the maps from the maps.me app. I wanted to remove several abandoned hotels/fuel stations, but in the end just didn't do it because editing OSM is quite tedious.

If you use Android, I suggest OsmAnd~. https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.osmand.plus

OsmAnd is an open source project, however the free OsmAnd version in the Play Store has limitations. You can get the full version (OsmAnd+) if you have money and want to support the developer, but OsmAnd~ has all the features of OsmAnd+.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#77

Post by schoen »

XorNot wrote: post #68
schoen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of work has been done publicly on a data model for resolving this kind of query? I was just wondering about that because I was noticing a little of how Google Maps responds in terms of different language names for places and features. Could this model be built automatically from existing OSM data, or would someone else have to manually add some kind of additional hierarchy information? Has this been studied…

The short answer is yes: OSMand (note, not OSM - but a fairly popular mapping/nav android app using its data) has users who build "full address maps" for entire countries, but it has to be put together as a downloadable bundle and mostly hasn't. The other problem is OSM tends to have good street maps, but very limited door-to-door coverage.

I'm just curious about how this works with some things that seem to add complexity (I haven't worked in this area at all):

- Different names for things in different parts of the address because of different languages? (What if two different parts are in different language, e.g. giving a Belgian city name in Flemish but the street name in French? Giving a Swiss address with a street name in French, city name in German, and canton name in French+? Giving a Russian address with the street name in Russian but the city and oblast name in English, possibly using different scripts?)

- Landmarks and points of interest, maybe with separate colloquial and official names? (Tower of St. Vincent? Torre de São Vincente? Torre de Belém? Tower of Belém? Tower of Belem?)

- How do you search if an address component is omitted (like leaving out a city in a U.S. address but including a state or a postal code)?

- How do you handle free-form text searches that might omit address delimiters, or include postal codes in a locally nonstandard order, or omit or include official postal designators for the components of the address (for example, Brazilian addresses might include the word "CEP" before the postal code but could be given without explicitly mentioning that the postal code is a postal code)?

Is there a good book or web site or FAQ about geographic name matching that I could look at to get a sense of what standard answers to these sorts of questions are?

+ In Switzerland, the same city could theoretically be referred to as "Fribourg, [Staat ]Freiburg" or "Freiburg, [État de ]Fribourg". Well, of course a human user might always search using any combination of languages with which they're familiar, or even ones they're not familiar with that they just copied and pasted from somewhere.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#78

Post by yaur »

freehunter wrote: post #32
jusuchin wrote: post #6

I recently used maps.me while in Europe (Germany and Poland), with no data plan and only GPS on Airplane mode. With the downloaded maps, it was great. It even included entertainment, restaurants and some transportation options.

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.

It didn't used to but was enabled in iOS 8.3.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#79

Post by ncd »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #45
legulere wrote: post #38

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…

That's harsh, but in the spirit of being constructive, here's a project for someone reading this. 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.…

Is there a specific place where I would go to flag things like this? Sounds like an interesting little project to build.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#80

Post by maxxxxx »

maxerickson wrote: post #64
schoen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of work has been done publicly on a data model for resolving this kind of query? I was just wondering about that because I was noticing a little of how Google Maps responds in terms of different language names for places and features. Could this model be built automatically from existing OSM data, or would someone else have to manually add some kind of additional hierarchy information? Has this been studied…

Photon builds nice, find as you type, free text search on top of OSM data: https://photon.komoot.de/ I wonder if GP is talking specifically about on device apps, Photon needs a pretty big index (31 gigabytes compressed): https://github.com/komoot/photon

Yes, I was talking about phone apps.

Just played with Photon on their website: It's better but still far away from Google's capability. Like it or not, but Google is very, very good with search :-)

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