(no title)
habi | 10 months ago
As an avid OpenStreetMapper I honestly wonder what kind of data is missing in OpenStreetMap. Is that something sighted persons cannot grasp and thus not add to OSM? Have you seen https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_for_the_blind ? Is something missing there?
> I also have to think about whether to go open or closed source before using their data.
No, you don’t. If you use the map data, you have to attribute it, but your code doesn’t need to be open. See https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guideline... for the guidelines on attribution.
blindprogrammer|10 months ago
Thank you for providing that link — it was helpful. The information I want to display is text-based rather than graphic-based. My plan is to have two systems working in tandem: physical hardware placed in areas of interest like bus stops, intersections, etc., and a user interface that queries this data. The UI will be entirely text-based, with an absolute minimum of graphics.
In the future, if this project succeeds, I aim to launch my own GPS satellite to bypass Google’s predatory API calls.
Yes — but in Phase 1, the map will be text-only to ensure accessibility. What I envision is a sort of Wikipedia for my entire city, where every landmark and point of interest is cataloged and annotated in a rolling fashion, allowing others to edit, expand, and improve. Kind of like Google Reviews — except not owned by an advertising company.
habi|10 months ago
That might be a bit more costly than calling any API :) And launching own GPS satellites has no connection with Google's API as far as I know.
Are you interested in location data only? Then you can actually query https://nominatim.org/, which does the (reverese) geocoding.
> the map will be text-only to ensure accessibility.
I wonder how that's done, something like https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapscii ?