I'm developing a transit mapping application for Android. OpenStreetMap in place of the standard Google Maps components has been far easier, much more hackable, more flexible, and overall much more fun to work with than Google's MapView. As an added bonus the libraries for Android (OSMDroid in particular) have total interop with the Google Maps API. It really has been a pleasure to dev against.
I think OSM is an accomplishment on the significance level of Wikipedia and I'm glad it exists.
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.
When I was traveling overland in central Asia, everybody I met was using maps.me with OSM. The maps were of surprisingly good quality and maps.me is superb, allowing the maps for whole countries to be downloaded (ideal if you don't have a data plan) and the route calculation is quick as long as the road grid isn't too dense.
I was amazed recently. About 3 years ago, my town in Japan had no maps on OSM at all. I set about adding in the routes that I rode on my bicycle, but it was pretty pathetic. I went to the UK for two years and when I came back somebody had finished everything. All the public paths and everything are clearly marked. I think the only thing left is to tag the stores.
The really nice thing about OSM is how easy it is to contribute. There is a famous bicycle route that goes through my town, but it is also famous because it is non-contiguous and completely unmarked on any map. The only way to find it is to ride on the roads and follow the signs (some of which are hand written by residents who live in the area). With OSM it was easy to mark the part of the route that I knew about and now I see a lot of touring cyclists coming through. It's incredibly empowering.
Used osmand from f-droid in Indonesia few weeks ago. Google maps was basically useless. OSM map in southern Lombok did send me down a crazy dirt path that was mapped as main road. That was fine for me, I was just exploring the country on a scooter not relying on it for anything important (uploaded fixes when I got back to the home stay).
Similarly experience in Philippines in January, Google maps had basically nothing in Palawan but OSM had great coverage.
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.
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.
Similarly, a lot of charitable organizations that could be releasing data to build on top of the OSM dataset and the tooling that exists, instead create their own data silos. For instance, Sustrans (the cycling charity in the UK), and the Ramblers (the walking/hiking charity in the UK). I get the impression that managers are coming up with ideas for their digital projects without any reference to the technical landscape outside their organization.
I don't know whether there's anything which could be done to help these more corporate charities get on board (for instance to make it easy for them to set up and maintain an official database using OSM tooling, on the basis that the data they gather is publicly available and licensed as open data).
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.
I'm a big fan of OSM, but I have to say that for my purposes (more geological than anthropocentric), QGIS becoming more functional over the past 5 years has been more important, especially after going independent. Similar to Python overtaking MATLAB in utility and likely eventual adoption, I think QGIS (esp. with improving OSM/python/JS support) will become the new standard for GIS outside of the mega-enterprise/private data world where ESRI is focusing.
It's really nice watching the confluence of open source technologies making a bigger and more powerful wave.
Yeah, I recently had to use some basic GIS to implement custom reverse geocoding functionality for my college senior project. My workflow looked like this:
- Get map data from OSM
- Use QGIS for analysis, feature extraction -> export as GeoJSON
- Write GeoJSON to MongoDB instance
Geolocation "works" out of the box thanks to Mongo's geospatial queries and the MongoDB client for Node. Overall, it was an extremely smooth experience, and involved the use of open-source tools from start to finish. This would have probably been impossible to do for free even just a few years back.
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 open data gets relicensed under the more restrictive OdBL license. Those areas also only rarely get touched by mappers.
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.
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.
I'm working on a project to create a parcel layer on top of OSM, to open source ownership data for all parcels in the US. This is relevant to my interests!
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 something like 100 or 1000 times more productive.
Also, OpenStreetMap provides the data, but Google aggregates the data, which makes very cheap to add/search a lot of information (ex: shops) available from on-line sources (such as web sites). I don't expect OSM to have the same amount of information any time soon.
There was a video Google made recently about some maps-related thing, and they had a brief clip of the software their map curators use.
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.
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.
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.
The only drawback I see with OSM that none of the apps I have tried has good search capability. I would like to be able to enter "11077 Wilshire, Los Angeles", instead I have to click through state. city and then street which is tedious and sometimes impossible.
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 from the computational linguistics side as well as the geospatial information side?
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.
If I had to pick one or the other, I'd pick OSM. Given a map, I can figure out my location, but the reverse is not true. (Of course, this is ignoring the fact that a lot of OSM data is likely generated using GPS.)
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.
We've been navigating on top of OSM for about 18 months now (Scout in the US, Scout/Skobbler in the EU/RoW) and it's pretty amazing how far it has come.
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).
There is widely used tagging for a large variety of place types, and it isn't all that complicated to extract that data (which is maybe glib, but the extraction shouldn't be a big hurdle for someone that is using the data for something interesting). So the problem is that the data is sparse.
From programmer's point of view working with OSM is quite annoying. OSM is being considered more as database than drawn map. But that database is inconsistent, contains many errors and its data structures are not good to represent non geographical items. On top of that mechanical edits of map are very discouraged. I think that OSM would only be good for simple stuff like showing on your website where's your business located. Anything more advanced like address searching or routing would never work reliably.
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 simple stuff. In fact using and contributing to it is a million dollar industry.
Mapbox does a great job of fixing things with out relying on users to do it for OSM! Just drop a pin and type out the problem and Mapbox's data team will likely fix the problem! These changes go right into OSM.
[+] [-] corndoge|10 years ago|reply
I think OSM is an accomplishment on the significance level of Wikipedia and I'm glad it exists.
[+] [-] lnanek2|10 years ago|reply
I don't think Google actually dog foods their Android Google Maps API, so it tends to be pretty limited.
[+] [-] donquichotte|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krasin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikekchar|10 years ago|reply
The really nice thing about OSM is how easy it is to contribute. There is a famous bicycle route that goes through my town, but it is also famous because it is non-contiguous and completely unmarked on any map. The only way to find it is to ride on the roads and follow the signs (some of which are hand written by residents who live in the area). With OSM it was easy to mark the part of the route that I knew about and now I see a lot of touring cyclists coming through. It's incredibly empowering.
[+] [-] fungi|10 years ago|reply
Similarly experience in Philippines in January, Google maps had basically nothing in Palawan but OSM had great coverage.
[+] [-] privong|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthonybsd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rz2k|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c0nsumer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brakenshire|10 years ago|reply
I don't know whether there's anything which could be done to help these more corporate charities get on board (for instance to make it easy for them to set up and maintain an official database using OSM tooling, on the basis that the data they gather is publicly available and licensed as open data).
[+] [-] pekk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amdavidson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cossatot|10 years ago|reply
It's really nice watching the confluence of open source technologies making a bigger and more powerful wave.
[+] [-] Cyph0n|10 years ago|reply
- Get map data from OSM
- Use QGIS for analysis, feature extraction -> export as GeoJSON
- Write GeoJSON to MongoDB instance
Geolocation "works" out of the box thanks to Mongo's geospatial queries and the MongoDB client for Node. Overall, it was an extremely smooth experience, and involved the use of open-source tools from start to finish. This would have probably been impossible to do for free even just a few years back.
[+] [-] legulere|10 years ago|reply
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 open data gets relicensed under the more restrictive OdBL license. Those areas also only rarely get touched by mappers.
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|10 years ago|reply
I'm working on a project to create a parcel layer on top of OSM, to open source ownership data for all parcels in the US. This is relevant to my interests!
[+] [-] Kankuro|10 years ago|reply
Also, OpenStreetMap provides the data, but Google aggregates the data, which makes very cheap to add/search a lot of information (ex: shops) available from on-line sources (such as web sites). I don't expect OSM to have the same amount of information any time soon.
[+] [-] IshKebab|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mtmail|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sp8962|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|10 years ago|reply
The maps themselves are very good.
[+] [-] schoen|10 years ago|reply
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 from the computational linguistics side as well as the geospatial information side?
[+] [-] liotier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jusuchin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zoidb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lallysingh|10 years ago|reply
https://github.com/geo-data/openstreetmap-tiles-docker
Note: a bit finicky.
[+] [-] icewater0|10 years ago|reply
Is it possible to calculate directions/routing locally too?
[+] [-] ascorbic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcthompson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meatysnapper|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chromelyke|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] oulipo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vtcraghead|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lcswi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ancymon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowbkpk|10 years ago|reply
I think you'll find that OSM is great for more than just simple stuff. In fact using and contributing to it is a million dollar industry.
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|10 years ago|reply
Address searches are possible though, as ever, it depends whether contributors have added those addresses to OSM.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Bharath1234|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hodwik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flippmoke|10 years ago|reply
Mapbox does a great job of fixing things with out relying on users to do it for OSM! Just drop a pin and type out the problem and Mapbox's data team will likely fix the problem! These changes go right into OSM.
[+] [-] monknomo|10 years ago|reply
I fixed a bunch of stuff wrong with my home town and found it pretty gratifying
[+] [-] awqrre|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unimpressive|10 years ago|reply
http://commoncrawl.org/
[+] [-] andyl|10 years ago|reply