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OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo
- lallysingh 11y agoIt 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 https://github.com/geo-data/openstreetmap-tiles-docker Note: a bit finicky.
- donquichotte 11y agoWhen 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.
- privong 11y agoI 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.
- donquichotte 11y agoYeah, 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.
- jarek 11y agoA somewhat hacky thing you can do is tweet to @OSMthis with the location embedded in the tweet, and it will add a note to OSM: https://twitter.com/osmthis/with_replies https://twitter.com/osmthis/with_replies Other editors can then see the note and might resolve it
- DarkLinkXXXX 11y agoIf you use Android, I suggest OsmAnd~. https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.osmand.plus 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+.
- kuschku 11y agoIn my place (and I live in a highly developed country, Germany) Google maps is missing a whole district of my city! Which leads to lots of people ending up in a dead end in a residential street, locking for the highway. Well, it’s always funny, but with Google’s data not updated since 2005, they’re pretty useless. It’s like Google only cares about the US.
- Splines 11y agoFWIW Google Maps also has an editor which is useful when you need to help other people find you.
- GFischer 11y agoGoogle Maps and editors and other Google maps-related collaboration tools are awful, if you need human interaction. I entered a location for the company I worked with. The company moved to another location, so I set about to change the address on Google Maps. To verify I was really the owner of the business, they decided to send mail... to the company's old address (which was occupied by a squatter at the point). End result, now you have two locations for the company, a correct one and an incorrect one. I also had a dispute when I edited a location on Antarctica (the Uruguayan base)... editors kept reverting the change.
- krasin 11y agoFor those who may have missed, maps.me is also gone open-source recently: https://github.com/mapsme/omim https://github.com/mapsme/omim
- anthonybsd 11y agoI've been looking for something like this for eternity. Thank you!
- rz2k 11y agoThat looks pretty good, but I don't understand why I can't restrict location services to when the app is in the foreground.
- fungi 11y agoUsed 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.
- babuskov 11y agoI used OSMand in Greece last Summer and it was fine as long as you applied common sense on some turns :)
- mikekchar 11y agoI 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.
- oulipo 11y agoThe only thing OSM is missing is a good open places database
- maxerickson 11y agoThere 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.
- vtcraghead 11y agoIf this is what you're referring to, we're getting there: http://openaddresses.io/ http://openaddresses.io/
- maxerickson 11y ago"Places" usually means something like Foursquare.
- reustle 11y agoWow, they've really got Japan covered
- maxerickson 11y agoOpenAddresses is a separate project from OSM that is aggregating publicly available address data. Japan has a national entity that makes the data available. The sources are all here: https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses
- mikekchar 11y agoOut of interest, people may not realize that Japan has a very different addressing system than in the west. Streets do no generally have names (though there are a few that do). Instead a city is divided up into areas. I won't try to explain it (for fear of getting it wrong ;-) ): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system Often foreigners get confused and see things that look like street signs, but which are actually signs for the chome (kind of a big block). They get very confused when they see another such sign on a different street going in a completely different direction :-) Anyway, Japanese people generally don't put address numbers on their houses. Instead they will put their name. So if you want to find an address for someone you don't know (or a business) it is really hard. For businesses that have to deliver things, it's really important to be able to find the address. So the public database is really useful. These days everybody generally navigates by GPS. You put the address in and the GPS unit will take you to the right place. Most navigation units will even be able to navigate from a land line phone number (as the phone numbers are pre-assigned to the address).
- c0nsumer 11y agoI 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.
- Brakenshire 11y agoSimilarly, 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).
- Xylakant 11y agohttp://wheelmap.org/ http://wheelmap.org/, a map for wheelchair accessible places builds on OSM.
- voltagex_ 11y agoWell there goes my spare time for the next little while - adding all the places I know of in my home town. It doesn't seem to switch to English properly, though.
- Xylakant 11y agoIt's a known issue and being worked on. Thanks for contributing!
- voltagex_ 11y agoJust a warning for any other contributors, at the moment the changeset that WheelMap posts to OSM puts a huge bounding box on the map which makes it really hard for other OSM users to see what's been changed. https://github.com/sozialhelden/wheelmap/issues/29 https://github.com/sozialhelden/wheelmap/issues/29
- jusuchin 11y agoI 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.
- zoidb 11y agoI discovered it recently as well, also it's pretty snappy due to the offline data.
- freehunter 11y agoI 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.
- awqrre 11y agoWi-Fi also does works in airplane mode, on Android at least...
- jdmichal 11y agoYour 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.
- schoen 11y agoI thought there was some kind of aviation safety rule against using radio receivers on board commercial flights, maybe because of retransmission of signals on the receiver's intermediate frequency?
- awqrre 11y agoMaybe not from a legal standpoint, but you can put your phone in airplane mode and then re-activate Wi-Fi and it will still be in airplane mode... unless they changed the behavior on newer Android OS
- andyl 11y agoIMHO Leaflet/OSM dev experience is so much better than Google maps - really glad to have this option.
- cossatot 11y agoI'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.
- Cyph0n 11y agoYeah, 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.
- aw3c2 11y agoYou might like https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/QuickOSM/ https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/QuickOSM/
- ascorbic 11y agoOSM is great of course, but it's a bit of a stretch to say it's more important in geo than GPS.
- rcthompson 11y agoIf 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.)
- andygates 11y agoKnowing where you are is truly disruptive. Having better maps is just having better maps. GPS has been so incorporated into daily life that we don't appreciate it any more.
- meatysnapper 11y agoGoogle 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.
- cthulhujr 11y agoJust 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.
- jarek 11y agoYou can add just about anything on OSM (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:En_key_descriptions 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)
- lnanek2 11y agoYeah, user experience on Google Maps app has been atrocious recently. I especially hate when I search and get cards when I want a map with placemarks on it, then try to get to the map and it forgets my search. Some designer sure went all out making it pretty, but they took out most of the functionality.
- corndoge 11y agoI'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.
- lnanek2 11y agoAndroid 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.
- skimpycompiler 11y agoGoogle 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 this limit can't easily be increased. My app can have millions of shortest paths requests per day, and I certainly do not have Google's infrastructure. I get incomparable functionality using OSM.
- jpatokal 11y agoYou 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/distancematrix 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 data. Also, if you think "all of the distances" are cached, I invite you to estimate how many places there are in the world and how big a matrix of every distance from every point to every other point would be. (Disclaimer: Used to work on Geo at Google. Opinions mine only, etc.)
- hodwik 11y agoI wish it didn't show Philadelphia as Trenton/Camden. That is so incorrect.
- monknomo 11y agoI'm not being facetious, don't take it the wrong way, but you could fix it. It's surprisingly easy. I fixed a bunch of stuff wrong with my home town and found it pretty gratifying
- maxerickson 11y agoProminence is hard to do automatically, so it may not be trivial to get the system that renders the osm.org tiles to prefer Philadelphia (it does things like look at population, but that data is present for Philadelphia).
- monknomo 11y agoVery true! I also took a look at it to figure out why it was showing up that way. They look like they are the same magnitude of thing (city) and they both have population. I'm wondering if it's actually showing Camden county?
- maxerickson 11y agoNo, it's not the county. I think what is happening is that the renderer decides there is no room to draw the Philadelphia label once the New Jersey label is in place.
- flippmoke 11y agohttps://www.mapbox.com/map-feedback/ https://www.mapbox.com/map-feedback/ 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.
- Kankuro 11y agoI 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.
- IshKebab 11y agoThere 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.
- mtmail 11y agoOpenvenues (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.
- sp8962 11y agoAs 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.
- legulere 11y agoAs 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.
- Doctor_Fegg 11y agoThat'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/ 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.
- ncd 11y agoIs there a specific place where I would go to flag things like this? Sounds like an interesting little project to build.
- maxerickson 11y agoI guess you would do something similar to this: http://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/ http://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/ There isn't really a "central" place to flag such errors.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
- chromelyke 11y agoWe'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).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ancymon 11y agoFrom 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.
- Doctor_Fegg 11y agoNot at all. Plenty of people, myself included, route with OSM data. Address searches are possible though, as ever, it depends whether contributors have added those addresses to OSM.
- ancymon 11y agoThe flag OSM geocoder is Nominatim. It turns out it won't work if you provide only part of street name (if OSM contains full street name) or when you provide full name (if OSM contains only part of the name) [1]. So in my opinion searching for addresses is not reliable. That's one thing, another is that addresses are quite often duplicated. There's no automatic check for that and such duplicates exist for years. [1] - https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/45825/how-can-i-geocode-addresses-reliably https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/45825/how-can-i-geo...
- Doctor_Fegg 11y agoThere are several geocoders available for OSM. To say that "the database is inconsistent [and] contains many errors", and then back that up solely with a criticism of one piece of client software, makes no sense.
- ancymon 11y agoI've backed the statement that OSM contains errors by saying that there are duplicated addresses. I've backed the statement that OSM is inconsistent by saying that sometimes streets in OSM contain full name and sometime only most important part (and that makes Nominatim unable to search for addresses).
- Bharath1234 11y agoWe at hammerhead.io have been using OSM to its full potential. It is been very helpful in navigation and tiles.
- maxxxxx 11y agoThe 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. The maps themselves are very good.
- schoen 11y agoWhat 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?
- maxerickson 11y agoPhoton builds nice, find as you type, free text search on top of OSM data: https://photon.komoot.de/ 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 https://github.com/komoot/photon
- maxxxxx 11y agoYes, 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 :-)
- sp8962 11y agoBesides 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....
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- awqrre 11y agoSomewhat unrelated, but any OpenWebSearch exist?
- unimpressive 11y agoSort of. If you wanted to make one you could probably get started with the Common Crawl dataset: http://commoncrawl.org/ http://commoncrawl.org/