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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

#91

Post by sp8962 »

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…

As to adding addresses/doors: simply do it on location with Go Map! (iOS) or Vespucci (Android), real easy particularly if you added building outlines before or they are already there.

Mapillary (mapillary.com) offers StreetView similar capabilities, including sign detection and can be used together with the desktop OSM editor JOSM and the in-browser editor iD.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#92

Post by skimpycompiler »

jpatokal wrote: post #87
skimpycompiler wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Maps is just too expensive and its pricing model isn't exponential at all, it's not even quadratic. Very common operation is looking for pairwise distance matrix. Pricing and limits are totally irrational. 100,000 daily limit is totally impossible for an app with 10 users. 100x100 = 10,000 :D Given that Google probably has all of the distances cached somewhere on their servers, I see no technical reason why th…

You seem to be talking about the HTTP web service Distance Matrix API, but why would you call that from an app? The JavaScript Distance Matrix API scales to essentially unlimited users for free: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/... I'm also not aware of OSM offering anything comparable out of the box, although there are some commercial providers who offers similar paid services based on OSM…

It's a mobile app primarily.

OSRM is a nice project - out of the box. The lead went to some giant - so project is currently a bit stray but there are also some other alternatives on github which work well but might not be as mature as OSRM.

Google caches insane amounts of things. What one might think is insane algorithms, it's probably just Googles multimillion cluster memory.

Google is also lucky that no one needs the whole matrix, I'm sure that distance matrix is insanely sparse and can be stored in not that large amount of memory.

I understand completely that Google offers these APIs completely for free and they can shut them down easily. I'm willing to pay for more but my quadratic needs aren't met with root pricing.

So, to waste sub-linearly I can easily setup OSRM for my needs :D

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#93

Post by sp8962 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #80
maxerickson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Besides Photon there is Mapzen search that provides search as you type.

Naturally comparing with google is a bit apples and oranges, on the one hand a company that purchases essentially all its data and spends billions on its mapping department, compared to the OSMF with a annual budget of roughly $150k. So it is not a surprise that some things take a bit longer with OSM, but it is tortoise vs. hare....

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#94

Post by AReallyGoodName »

skimpycompiler wrote: post #55
lnanek2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android developer here as well. Have found the same. It has saved the day before where the only other option would have been licensing commercial options like skobbler. I don't think Google actually dog foods their Android Google Maps API, so it tends to be pretty limited.

Google Maps is just too expensive and its pricing model isn't exponential at all, it's not even quadratic. Very common operation is looking for pairwise distance matrix. Pricing and limits are totally irrational. 100,000 daily limit is totally impossible for an app with 10 users. 100x100 = 10,000 :D Given that Google probably has all of the distances cached somewhere on their servers, I see no technical reason why th…

Online geocoding service are always the worst way to go. You only use the online services if you don't have an alternative dataset.

The osm datasets actually aren't that big, the entire PBF formatted dataset is Also it's just completely fucking ridiculous to send a request over the internet to perform a calculation.

I encountered the issue myself ages ago where i had a task to reverse geocode for a railways GPS system for every train every minute. Google and other services would have costed millions of dollars every year, used massive amounts of bandwidth and been waaay too slow. I wrote a library - https://github.com/AReallyGoodName/OfflineReverseGeocode in a day that could easily do millions of lookups each minute.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#95

Post by jarek »

cthulhujr wrote: post #28
meatysnapper wrote: post #20

Google maps on the web and on mobile has become such a miserably bad experience that I hope OSM wins big. Google's data is not bad, but the apps are awful.

Just noticed OSM has overhead power lines on their maps. A quick search reveals GM either doesn't have that data or doesn't have any way of displaying it. +1 for OSM in my book.

You can add just about anything on OSM (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:En_key_descripti...), so the only limit is what people actually map :)

(and sometimes what the community decides, e.g. adding things that can't be seen anymore, like old tram lines, is generally frowned upon in main OSM and requested for something like Open Historical Map instead)

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#96

Post by sp8962 »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #43
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…

I would love to contribute data, but have also experienced difficulty using the tools.

I would suggest help.openstreetmap.org or one of the itc channels http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IRC for support.

The in-browser editor iD is really easy to use, however currently does not work with IE.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#97

Post by maxerickson »

ncd wrote: post #79
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess you would do something similar to this:

http://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/

There isn't really a "central" place to flag such errors.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#98

Post by sp8962 »

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…

There are plenty of QA tools available including such which show data that is stale.

It is true that very large multi-polygons can be hard to edit however they tend to be exclusively used for modelling large landuse areas and administrative boundaries, and tend to have no impact at all on adding and editing roads, buildings, POIs and so on.

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#99

Post by Litost »

c0nsumer wrote: post #85
Litost wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still slightly new to editing OSM as a MTBer, maxerickson and c0nsumer have covered the details of how to do this already very well, but i found after comparing a seemingly never ending number of competing apps in this space, i found Viewranger GPS really useful: a) For planning routes in advance to then download to your smartphone and follow using the app (as mentioned elsewhere OSM was definitely the best mappi…

In case you aren't aware, Strava has switched to OSM for its maps which is pretty darn handy. (It's also knowing that all of the local MTB trails that I've surveyed / mapped are now properly on Strava.)

Ah thanks, it's been over a year since i did the initial evaluation, sounds like i'm overdue another :).

Re: OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo

#100

Post by yellowbkpk »

incanus77 wrote: post #70
yellowbkpk wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll find that there are plenty of companies making lots of money selling services on top of OSM's "inconsistent" data. Mapbox sells an extremely powerful map styling system, geocoding/searching, and routing. Mapzen sells similar services. MapQuest offers services using OSM data. Apple Maps uses OSM data in areas where commercial data isn't available. I think you'll find that OSM is great for more than just…

Mapzen isn't selling anything.

True 'nuf. I suppose I meant "selling" in terms of promoting, not dollar bills.
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