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How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap
- ucaetano 8y agoThis is competitive pressures at work, similarly to IBM and other's investment in Linux in the early 2000's as a way to place competitive pressure on MS/Windows. If you're not the leader in the field, and won't be able to catch up just by investing, you try to make the leadership in the field (Google's) irrelevant. If the 2nd-best-by-small-margin base map info is open, having the best one isn't a competitive advantage anymore.
- nugget 8y agoGoogle recently hiked enterprise license fees for access to translation services pretty substantially. I wonder if we'll see similar competitive momentum in that market.
- ucaetano 8y agoMost likely, yes. But translation services are far easier to enter than mapping.
- Scene_Cast2 8y agoBoth are hard and are open problems.
- ucaetano 8y agoSure, but very different. Mapping requires real-world operations, such as driving cars and taking pictures around the entire world, and doing it again and again. This is far more cost-intensive, both in upfront as in maintenance, than the translation problem. Software is easy. The real world is hard.
- detuur 8y agoWhich is exactly the point. Translation is a real-world problem. You need to actively go into the real world, find problem cases, make your translation software translate it, make your own translation, compare the translations, teach your software to translate it correctly, and hope that your approach is good enough. The real-world constraint of translation software is building a sizeable quality corpus of real-world text with real-world living human translators. We're lucky that the EU employs literally thousands of translators to publish identical texts across languages (for free!!), which has helped make European languages pretty much a solved problem in machine translation. But anything non-european is still hopelessly incomprehensible, simply because we don't have enough real-world data.
- webreac 8y agoSince they are using this strategy, translation of idioms is terrible. I have switched translate.
- logicallee 8y agoTo what?
- BookmarkSaver 8y agoFar easier to enter, because so far there isn't a single one that is more than vaguely useful. As far as I'm aware, there isn't really much business at all for translation because at the end of the day, if you want it done anywhere close to correctly, you have to hire someone that actually knows both languages.
- nickysielicki 8y agoSecond best? At least in my experience, OSM data is leaps and bounds better than Google Maps in every way possible, and it has been that way for a couple years now. The reason that I still use Google maps is that it's fast and well-integrated with my phone, and it has a lot of added features on top of the actual mapping that makes it very useful --- things like location sharing when you're on a longer road trip, creating a notification on your phone to route to an address from your browser, live traffic information, road closures, and business reviews. In terms of the actual data, though, the details available on OSM puts Google's data to shame. I've been trying to get Google to fix an incorrect path drawn at a state park that I frequent. I've submitted an alternative route twice now, but it's been denied twice with little explanation. The path is a loop, but Google has it missing half of the loop, off by an eighth of a mile or so, and has it drawn where it cuts through private property. In contrast, OSM's data is completely spot on with what my GPS shows. The park is in a tourist area, and I go to this park often enough that I've actually ran into multiple people visiting who have been standing on the trail with Google Maps open on their phone, thinking they've made a wrong turn. I've experienced the same thing at GNP in Montana, BWCA in Minnesota/Canada, and all along the Richardson Highway in Alaska. If you're in a rural area or on public land, OSM data is the best available --- even better than what a ranger station would sell you.
- BrandoElFollito 8y agoI once reported an issue with a stadium in my city. I bike in front of it twice a day. The issue was that it was licated on the wrong side of the road. They said that they checked and it is ok. I asked them how they did this because, well, I actually see the place twice a day. They said that they have ways to check (or smthg like that). I then sent M their own stree view link and screenshot. Not good enough. So I have up, I do not need the gps to bike there twice a day. Two years later, suddenly it was approved. All my corrections are now approved automatically (within an hour or so) so they may have improved. I also told them to check on OSM where I also updated some information about the surroundings :)
- ucaetano 8y ago> Second best? At least in my experience, OSM data is leaps and bounds better than Google Maps in every way possible, and it has been that way for a couple years now. I'm sure that, for whatever product in the world, you can find a subset of people in the world who will swear that such product is, in they experience, the best in the world.
- another-cuppa 8y agoGoogle does not have the best base map info. OSM may well be the best global base map, actually. Google's advantage is their applications that use the data.
- golfer 8y agoCitation please? What do base your statement of fact on?
- seren 8y agoOSM is generally richer in term of what can be documented. For example, you can describe a bench, how many seat it has, what color is it, is it in metal, wood or stone, and so on. This is not necessarily displayed on osm.org, but could be on a more specialized app using osm dataset. For example compare the two following areas : https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/41.88846/12.49110 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/41.88846/12.49110 https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8884227,12.4916715,17.54z https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8884227,12.4916715,17.54z Google Maps is lacking some details inside the park, you don't have any path, fence, grass, water tap, bench or bin. The issue for OSM is that some less popular areas are totally barren.
- kqr 8y agoAlso note that the osm.org bitmap tiles do not, in general, contain all information OSM has about an area. Things like future roads, hedges, etc. may not be shown.
- diegoperini 8y agoNot that I don't believe in your claim (I really prefer to live in world where OSM is better) but isn't how you form your argument is a kind of confirmation bias?
- MintPattern 8y agoWhat are some OSM-based mobile apps that I can compare against Google with?
- sabas_ge 8y agoIn what area? OSM data cover lots of use cases. For navigation on Android check out Maps.me or Osmand.
- orblivion 8y agoSeems like OSM has a future. This is great. Only sad thing is perhaps some day we won't be able to have the fun of making contributions ourselves, if the big companies handle all that for us like Google does. In the mean time, though, I can make an easier case to people as to why they should care about this, since it's now used by Apple and Pokémon Go.
- nextos 8y agoOSM worked great for me on newly built streets in Cambridge UK, where Google Maps had zero cartography. The only major disadvantage of OSM-derived applications is the lack of real-time traffic information. Google Maps harvests data from phones inside cars and some car navigation systems. They also buy it from third parties. http://opentraffic.io/ http://opentraffic.io/ is trying to do some data harvesting, but it's still not very good. Another option would be to build an aggregator. Lots of governments publish real-time traffic data, so it should be a matter of integrating that into an OSM layer. Lastly, there's this old technology called Traffic Message Channel which uses RDS (digital data on FM radio) to broadcast traffic warnings. It's quite popular in Western Europe. There's already a F-Droid application that is trying to provide an interface for that: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.vonglasow.michael.qz/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.vonglasow.michael.qz/ I cannot stress how important live traffic information is. Without live traffic, navigating on densely populated areas is a nightmare. It's the only part of my mobile workflow I can't do using F-Droid applications. I'm currently forced to use a web version of Google Maps.
- danpat 8y agoHere at Mapbox we're doing navigation on OSM with traffic data - we collect our own telemetry, and use it to guide OSM-based routing. There are numerous Android/iOS apps using our API that you could use, or you could build one yourself.
- em3rgent0rdr 8y agoPlease elaborate. From where and how do you get the traffic data from, and is it sufficient?
- kerng 8y agoThis is great! Google has recently spiked fees drastically and it will be good to see more alternatives with high quality data
- t0mislav 8y agoBecause of that I needed to abandon Google Maps Api. But good thing is I learned how to download OSM data, generate and host my own maps.
- Moru 8y agoYeah, me too :-) Just got it running yesterday on my devbox. Still thinking of hireing Geofabrik to set up the real server when I'm done though.
- bepotts 8y agoAre Apple and Microsoft's map services built on OpenStreetMap? Or are they just contributing for the heck of it?
- Cursuviam 8y agoYes, they both are.
- lucideer 8y agoNot originally, though Microsoft have recently added an OSM layer to Bing, and Apple have attributed OSM as being a contributor to their overall AppleMaps dataset in some parts of the world.
- rainbowmverse 8y agoApple Maps lists a whole bunch of data providers. OpenStreetMap is among them.
- mariushn 8y agoFeel free to install on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapswithme.maps.pro https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapswithme... or https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand.plus https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand.plu...
- em3rgent0rdr 8y agoeven better...don't need to use Google Play: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/
- lucideer 8y agoalso, the gp's first link (MAPS.ME) is available on FDroid as an open source fork with ads & blobs removed: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ It also comes with some nice extra features added, but ymmv on the stability of those features
- Markoff 8y agolast time i checked you could not login with your account and update maps, is it fixed?
- jaakl 8y agoThere is also some controversy around it : the big players do data mixing from different sources, which is not strictly compliant with OSM licenses. Also some say that their bulk editing creates nice map data, but harms local potential mapping communities, with early case of Netherlands where AND contributed map data resulted to no real manual map updates afterwards. So some say that community, not map must come first, so the “guerilla mapping” is bad.
- lucideer 8y ago> There is also some controversy around it Do you have a link to some commentary on this? I'm aware of MS's generated US building footprints[0] but this hasn't (yet) been integrated into OSM (largely I think due to quality and bulk-import etiquette worries). And also StreetSide[1] but this isn't imported into OSM itself, rather it's displayed as an aid for editors. Facebook is looking at contributions similar to MS's US building footprints (but for roads), but again this is mainly around tooling and generation rather than data sources, and is speculative as far as I've seen. [0] https://github.com/Microsoft/USBuildingFootprints https://github.com/Microsoft/USBuildingFootprints [1] https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/5050 https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/5050
- rmc 8y ago> Do you have a link to some commentary on this? https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:AI-Assisted_Road_Tracing https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:AI-Assisted_Road_Tr... https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57942 https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57942 https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=63456 https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=63456 https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57387 https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57387
- lucideer 8y agoThis is great, but I'm surprised to see Apple featured so prominently in the title here alongside Facebook and Microsoft. Apple has an internal volunteer programmer whereby employees can choose to spend their time contributing to OSM—part of employee benefits (which is nice), whereas Microsoft and Facebook are actually contributing mapping data the company has created/collected to OSM. Furthermore, just 2 of the 3 listed companies are major sponsors of OSM events: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_of_the_Map_2018#Sponsorship https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_of_the_Map_2018#Sp...
- thinkingemote 8y agoApple now employee their own teams to do mapping
- lucideer 8y agoDo you have a source? I'd be interested to look at the work they're doing.
- mtmail 8y agohttps://github.com/osmlab/appledata https://github.com/osmlab/appledata
- lucideer 8y agoThanks for that. I see now that it's linked from the article—I'd previously overlooked it as the article seemed to imply it was the product of their volunteer programme, but it seems it isn't: > The building information was developed with sensors from low altitude aerial imagery. > The building footprint and height information was captured and developed in 2013. There's also Atlas[0], not mentioned in the article, which seems to be a (open-source/non-free??[1]) tool released by Apple for use specifically with OSM data. Really interesting stuff. [0] https://github.com/osmlab/atlas https://github.com/osmlab/atlas [1] https://github.com/osmlab/atlas/blob/dev/LICENSE https://github.com/osmlab/atlas/blob/dev/LICENSE
- yur3i__ 8y agoI want to try openstreetmap, whats the best client available for android? (Pref. f-droid)
- Monkey0x9 8y agoI use OsmAnd, it works great for me.
- hoschicz 8y agoMAPS.ME is the best one by a pretty fat margin, I'd say. Map viewing is wonderful, the best I have experienced on Android. It's very fast and super detailed. Routing has some issues. The estimates are way off, routing by bike means road bike (not MTB) and the voiceover speaks too early or too late.
- 43920 8y agoI've had a pretty good experience with Galileo (https://galileo-app.com/ https://galileo-app.com/) on iOS; it looks like there's an Android version that's fairly similar.
- pymai 8y agoI use both osmAnd and Maps.me from the fdroid store. Maps.me: https://f-droid.org/app/com.github.axet.maps https://f-droid.org/app/com.github.axet.maps osmAnd has a ton of features. maps is more basic but is better for navigation since it has a 3d option
- kqr 8y agoOSMAnd is rather powerful, and its UI is not intuitive at all before you spend some time with it, but it's what I've come to like.
- hetspookjee 8y agoFor anyone interested in setting up their own OSM tile server + Nominatim geocoding: Here's an up to date docker image that is relatively easy to set up: https://github.com/drwitter/osm-tiles-docker https://github.com/drwitter/osm-tiles-docker Great for maps in offline environments and/or querying without API limits! Really think OSM is great.
- richforrester 8y agoOur HR department wouldn't let me give proper feedback. Even though I've had some people that, with a little tweak to their knowledge, or a slight shift in thinking, could become great hires. There's tonnes of candidates out there that just lack something small, or are slightly less ideal than someone else... yet still have all the raw talent and potential in the world. But you can't always hire them because you don't have the resources to up-skill them efficiently. Or you need someone that can more readily contribute to a project. I've certainly got some people in mind whom I'd love to contact as soon as I start at a different employer, to drag them on board if said employer had the resources to properly develop them. Ah well.
- confounded 8y agoWrong thread, perhaps.
- richforrester 8y agoThat's embarrassing.
- andrewharvey 8y agoUber https://github.com/Uber-OSM/NewZealand https://github.com/Uber-OSM/NewZealand plus many other smaller organisations have dedicated OSM teams contributing too.
- xmichael999 8y agoThey could use some money and hardware... Currently the site loads This website is under heavy load (queue full) We're sorry, too many people are accessing this website at the same time. We're working on this problem. Please try again later.
- LukeWalsh 8y agoDuring a rotational program out of college I was the product manager at Facebook working on maps as the team led up to the first ML contributions to OpenStreetMap (https://2016.stateofthemap.us/how-can-ai-help-us-make-maps/ https://2016.stateofthemap.us/how-can-ai-help-us-make-maps/). There's an interesting story about a large mistake I made that is interesting to share: I started working on this project because I believe that map data should be open as did everyone else on the team. There was (and still is to some extent) a lot of skepticism about whether large corporations have the best interest of the map at heart - and what tools need to be put in place to make sure the quality stays high. It's pretty clear to me that there can be an alignment in goals because whether it's a company, person, or nonprofit everyone prefers accurate map data. The questions are about margins of error & OSM rightfully leans toward only extremely high confidence. One good thing about Facebook joining in on updating the open map is resources are not much of an issue. Our team was able to just call up and purchase the rights to the satellite images we needed instantly. For quite some time we had working models that generated edits for roads that were missing from the map. Leading up to the yearly conference there was a question of whether we should present all of our findings to the community and see what they thought before making any edits. No one on the team was willing to push the button on submitting any of our edits because we weren't sure if they were good enough and it would feel shitty to be the one who broke the relationship between Facebook & OSM. Beyond the software engineers even the people who were paid hourly to train the models became invested in believing it was important that Facebook reach a way to channel its massive resources into the project. Eventually we all gathered up and I just pushed the button to contribute a random 1km / 1km square in Egypt (we'd already computed edits across the country accounting for over 100% increase but things could always get better). Then we waited. No one ever reached out so we started contributing a little more at a steady rate to see if anyone else working in the country noticed (including improving the original 1km / 1km box as the models improved). We were testing the ML in some of the harshest conditions we could find (low contrast in the desert) so the research team started working on another model for India (winding dirt roads, lots of rivers, tree cover). All of our edits went through street-by-street human approval which was working but slow going since the number of people on the project could fit in a Facebook friend recommendation unit. After not receiving much contact in Egypt (the map community there is small) we received initial positive feedback from local mappers in India and decided to ramp up the speed of contributing which meant getting a war room in Menlo Park and rounding up a larger group of people to review the machine suggested roads. I ended up gathering a few too many people and myself along with the core team was too hasty in communicating the quality bar for submission. We planned to shadow edits as the week went on to make sure the new members were up to speed but things unfolded much more quickly. Within a few hours we accidentally submitted a few bad roads. A local mapper noticed as he'd just driven the area on his motorcycle the day before. I immediately left a meeting where we were negotiating buying more satellite imagery and jumped on a bike back to the war room. No harm done, we had scripts ready to undo edits. When I got into the war room things were more problematic. Quite a few of the new folks had made similar mistakes so we paused everything. There was now a small group of local mappers in an IRC channel worried about large scale vandalism (though they quickly realized that wasn't the case). They noticed the breadth of the edits and tracked down the accounts of most everyone in the room. The map community in India is one of the better communities but still a room of this many people making edits at a such a scale was unlike anything you'd normally expect since the ML made editing 10-100x faster than hand tracing imagery. During the time when the local mappers believed this might be intentional vandalism they escalated to the global community. So that's how a large chunk of the OSM leadership found out Facebook was doing work on the map - some of our worst edits. Shit! It ended up not being so bad however. The entirety of the bad edits were reverted in a few minutes with oversight from the head of the OSM data working group. IMO the situation accidentally showed some of the OSM corporate contribution skeptics that even the worst case wasn't so bad & Facebook was definitely wanting the community in control of any crises. It wasn't all thought through but it's quite interesting in retrospect how the engagement strategy panned out.
- vanous 8y agoSo OsmAnd and maps.me look great. Is there an Android app which i could run to contribute traffic data flow and traffic events (accidents or obstacles on the road) like Waze does?
- rmc 8y agoThere might be 3rd party apps that do it, but OpenStreetMap doesn't store or support traffic data flow. Maybe http://opentraffic.io/ http://opentraffic.io/ ?
- konsnos 8y agoSomeone mentioned it in the thread but I can't find who. There is https://openstreetcam.org https://openstreetcam.org that I haven't yet used but intend to.
- rmc 8y agoYahoo (remember them?) allowed OSMers to use their aerial imagery from 2007 till 2011. Microsoft has allowed OSMers to use Bing aerial since 2010, and to be honest, it's probably been the most beneficial contribution to OSM of the ones in the article. Also, Apple gave a talk at SotM about "working with the community" and demanded that that talk not be recorded (unlike all other talks thre) or shared with anyone else. Hardly in keeping with the spirit of "openness". Facebook's computer vision imports are of dubious use.
- dingaling 8y agoIndeed the Bing imagery is one of the greatest non-financial gifts ever given by a technology company, regardless of motives. When I started working on OSM about a decade ago my area was a greenish blur on the photo underlay and everything had to be manually positioned from GPX tracks. It took hours to map a street and given GPS error margins it was never certain to be exact. Now anyone can log-in and start tracing roads / paths / buildings and it just takes a couple of physical visits to backfill the enumeration and names.
- sabas_ge 8y agoJust to point out that the Apple talk was not recorded due to the company wide policy. (I was at SotM) On the FB import you still think of the first import, but after that they worked a lot with the local communities.
- mwexler 8y agoMaps are not just roads. POIS, transit rails, pedi paths all play a role,esp in cities. And OSM does well with path data but it's POI data is disappointing compared to Google. Transit stations are in the data but no info about what lines serve them. For eateries or stores, hours, menu focus, parking data is often part of Google POIs but is missing from OSM. All great reasons this data is not present, but that does limit OSM usage in a wide group of cases. The data that is present, however, is wonderful.
- andygates 8y agoOne of the challenges there is POI freshness. A paying advertiser is going to be timely across the Googleverse.
- seren 8y agoI do occasionally add opening hours to OSM but the interface is a bit clunky in id editor. I would recommend using Street Complete, that has a really easy interface to add that kind of information to osm. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost.streetcomplete&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost... It is in beta but still very useful, and does not feel like a beta (really stable)
- tinus_hn 8y agoIt is quite strange to see that many companies compiling essentially the same dataset for themselves. If a proprietary map is not necessary for your strategy it may well make more sense to go with OpenStreetMap.
- amelius 8y agoI wish they contributed to DuckDuckGo as well. Or perhaps the issue is that DuckDuckGo is not open-source?
- anderspitman 8y agoIs there anything OSM-based like gmaps with the ability to search for ie restaurants in an area, then get voice navigation to the location? Even something that lets you search for "McDonalds near this address" would probably be good enough for me to switch.
- maxerickson 8y agoSure, but how useful they are will depend on whether the data in your area of interest is decent or not. OSMAnd and Maps.Me both have poi search and voice navigation.