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Been eyeing Mapbox myself. How do you think OSM/Mapbox can deal with the constant burden of meta-data gathering? From some basic OSM v Google tests, OSM covera

Been eyeing Mapbox myself. How do you think OSM/Mapbox can deal with the constant burden of meta-data gathering? From some basic OSM v Google tests, OSM coverage was much lower for things like place names or speed limits. As you say, the infrastructure requirements for this seem massive, though perhaps getting better as GIS info become easier to gather.

lucb1e 8y ago
> From some basic OSM v Google tests, OSM coverage was much lower for things like place names or speed limits. In which region did you test? The local mapping community can make a night and day difference. In Africa there are places almost in unmapped on Google that are extensively mapped on OSM (Google doesn't give a damn if there isn't money to be made). In western Europe it's pretty good, especially in the Netherlands and Germany (that I know of at least, perhaps other countries too). America, from what I've seen (I've never been there so never needed to use it) it can be either reasonably comprehensive or a total mess depending on the city or state or something.
- jstandard 8y ago
  > it can be either reasonably comprehensive or a total mess depending on the city or state or something. I'm currently evaluating US coverage and this has been my experience, though even cases with better coverage it still fell short of Google Maps. It's a tough problem in the sense that people have generally gotten used to the excellent coverage of Google Maps, so anything deviating in even a minor way is seen as noticeably inferior. I'd love to know if others are running into similar issues in the US.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    If you mean business locations and the like, OSM is more or less empty in the US. Cities and towns and similar should be okay. What it amounts to is that there aren't any openly licensed business geodatabases and there aren't really that many people working on OSM in the US, especially commercial POIs (where people buy data from Yelp or Foursquare or Factual or whatever instead).

lucb1e 8y ago

> From some basic OSM v Google tests, OSM coverage was much lower for things like place names or speed limits. In which region did you test? The local mapping community can make a night and day difference. In Africa there are places almost in unmapped on Google that are extensively mapped on OSM (Google doesn't give a damn if there isn't money to be made). In western Europe it's pretty good, especially in the Netherlands and Germany (that I know of at least, perhaps other countries too). America, from what I've seen (I've never been there so never needed to use it) it can be either reasonably comprehensive or a total mess depending on the city or state or something.

jstandard 8y ago
> it can be either reasonably comprehensive or a total mess depending on the city or state or something. I'm currently evaluating US coverage and this has been my experience, though even cases with better coverage it still fell short of Google Maps. It's a tough problem in the sense that people have generally gotten used to the excellent coverage of Google Maps, so anything deviating in even a minor way is seen as noticeably inferior. I'd love to know if others are running into similar issues in the US.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  If you mean business locations and the like, OSM is more or less empty in the US. Cities and towns and similar should be okay. What it amounts to is that there aren't any openly licensed business geodatabases and there aren't really that many people working on OSM in the US, especially commercial POIs (where people buy data from Yelp or Foursquare or Factual or whatever instead).