6 ms·

Seems 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 co

Seems 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 ago
OSM 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 ago
  Here 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 ago
    Please elaborate. From where and how do you get the traffic data from, and is it sufficient?
    - morganherlocker 8y ago
      Our traffic data is generated in house using anonymized location telemetry from our SDKs, much like most other traffic providers. The live speed predictions we generate for congestion and ETA models are competitive globally, providing the most accurate ETAs available in many parts of the world. Our accuracy today is particularly strong in the US, when compared to similar services.
      - arctux 8y ago
        Do you know if Mapbox has any plans to work with the World Bank's OpenTraffic[0]? [0]: http://opentraffic.io http://opentraffic.io
        morganherlocker 8y ago
        Not at this time. It's an awesome project, but we started developing our traffic engines around the same time and needs quickly diverged. We do try to open source many of the low level pieces of our model as reusable libraries whenever possible, such as our graph normalization algorithms[1]. At the end of the day, much of the core is difficult to decouple from data engineering infrastructure which will be internal to each organization, due to the immense volumes of live data that must be handled to power a modern traffic engine. Aspects of the model like noise reduction, modality classification, and speed distribution estimation also require lots of fine tuning that is specific to the telemetry being ingested & the usage patterns of the output. For example, our speed models learn and correct from observed errors in various situations over time, which is coupled to our internal metrics data. [1] https://github.com/mapbox/graph-normalizer https://github.com/mapbox/graph-normalizer
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    I've been wondering, given that you've made all of the building blocks, why hasn't Mapbox built and released an open source maps app for Android? It looks like you're just weekend's work away from having an open source app which is competetive with Google Maps on F-Droid.
    - JetSpiegel 8y ago
      OsmAnd already exists, and it had a metric ton of development time put into it.
    - jakecopp 8y ago
      I second this, and very interested in doing it myself!
    - pymai 8y ago
      I presumed they open sourced it already since the "Maps" app in the fdroid store is the same app just minus some ads or something
      - rmc 8y ago
        The "Maps" app in fdroid[1] is actually a recompilation of Maps.me[2], which is from another company, not Mapbox. [1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ [2] https://maps.me/ https://maps.me/
    - mberg 8y ago
      Mapbox has been pretty strategic about not being perceived to compete with it's developers. Besides creating an amazing stack remaining neutral I think is part of their appeal.
- muglug 8y ago
  > OSM worked great for me on newly built streets in Cambridge UK, where Google Maps had zero cartography. Cambridge is incredibly atypical, though, given its large number of smart people without much money.
  - andygates 8y ago
    New builds are a target of opportunity for local mappers. There only need to be one or two in a medium city to spot these. It's a much more _fun_ activity than, say, maintaining POIs.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
> 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. There will always be room for individual contributions, because there are things that the big corporations do not care about. For example, many hiking trails and agricultural tracks good for cycling are missing from Google Maps because they simply do not have a business case for those details. Yet they are on OpenStreetMap because when OSM editors actually walk or cycle those ways, they add them to OSM. Another example is opening hours for shops. There are only three ways those can end up on the map: 1) the business itself adds them, 2) a large corporation is aware of them and adds them, or 3) an individual mapper copies them off the sign at the shop’s entrance. For a lot of small shops, only 3 is realistically going to happen.
- orblivion 8y ago
  Yeah, it also crossed my mind that once the basic stuff is in place, it frees us up to add more of the niche interest stuff.
- matt4077 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure that Google Maps does auto-discovery of hiking and biking trails by simply watching peoples' positions? At least I've had rather good experiences using Maps for biking. Even small, unofficial paths were mapped, and travel times indicated that Maps had an accurate idea of their condition.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Google's pretty weak for hiking trails in the US in my experience; OSM is far from perfect but it's much better. They're both significantly worse than maps focused on hikers.
    - zylepe 8y ago
      I recently switch https://onthegomap.com https://onthegomap.com from google to OSM for walking paths between points. The trail quality is much better where I live (Massachusetts) but I have been getting a lot of complaints from people all over the world that it no longer has their trails. I wonder what the lowest friction way to get my users to help contribute trails to OSM would be?
sidstling 8y ago
Why wouldn’t it have a future? We use it quite a lot in the European public sector where we can’t use google maps because of privacy issues. We’ve written a small app that does route calculations for us to make reporting business related driving (you get a refund, but that has to be taxed in specific ways) an automated process. We use OSM in that, but we do pay a company to do the routing algorithm and supply the data in a way that doesn’t abuse the standard OSM api. I’m not sure exactly how they do that, I think they host part of OSM or something like that. There is a big industry for small companies which are specialized in those things in Europe, and they are typically cheaper and easier to use than google. We also rely heavily on OSM in our GIS department, where we have our own private maps, though they aren’t so much for traffic we have been building our own “street-view” thing, using OSM and our own 360 images. The disadvantage of OSM is actually the submission process, like if a street is wrong, and you supply the correct information, it’s not always accepted right away. Which is a huge issue if you rely on it for something serious. That hasn’t been an issue for us for two years though, but we did have one week where an elected official couldn’t submit his driving because of a wrong one-way street.
- kqr 8y ago
  > The disadvantage of OSM is actually the submission process, like if a street is wrong, and you supply the correct information, it’s not always accepted right away. In what way does this happen? I haven't experienced it yet and I get the impression my edits are accepted automatically. Is someone reverting your changes with no good justification?
  - sidstling 8y ago
    I had a change denied because I didn’t attach open source evidence, so it was my fault, but because it got contested I couldn’t just redo the change. An account vetting system would solve this. Being an official municipality it’s kind of silly that we can change the actual direction of a street, but not use our internal maps as evidence for it. ;)
    - Freak_NL 8y ago
rmc 8y ago
> 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 There is some opposition within the OSM community from getting big tech corps to do all the work.

nextos 8y ago

OSM 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 ago
Here 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 ago
  Please elaborate. From where and how do you get the traffic data from, and is it sufficient?
  - morganherlocker 8y ago
    Our traffic data is generated in house using anonymized location telemetry from our SDKs, much like most other traffic providers. The live speed predictions we generate for congestion and ETA models are competitive globally, providing the most accurate ETAs available in many parts of the world. Our accuracy today is particularly strong in the US, when compared to similar services.
    - arctux 8y ago
      Do you know if Mapbox has any plans to work with the World Bank's OpenTraffic[0]? [0]: http://opentraffic.io http://opentraffic.io
      - morganherlocker 8y ago
        Not at this time. It's an awesome project, but we started developing our traffic engines around the same time and needs quickly diverged. We do try to open source many of the low level pieces of our model as reusable libraries whenever possible, such as our graph normalization algorithms[1]. At the end of the day, much of the core is difficult to decouple from data engineering infrastructure which will be internal to each organization, due to the immense volumes of live data that must be handled to power a modern traffic engine. Aspects of the model like noise reduction, modality classification, and speed distribution estimation also require lots of fine tuning that is specific to the telemetry being ingested & the usage patterns of the output. For example, our speed models learn and correct from observed errors in various situations over time, which is coupled to our internal metrics data. [1] https://github.com/mapbox/graph-normalizer https://github.com/mapbox/graph-normalizer
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  I've been wondering, given that you've made all of the building blocks, why hasn't Mapbox built and released an open source maps app for Android? It looks like you're just weekend's work away from having an open source app which is competetive with Google Maps on F-Droid.
  - JetSpiegel 8y ago
    OsmAnd already exists, and it had a metric ton of development time put into it.
  - jakecopp 8y ago
    I second this, and very interested in doing it myself!
  - pymai 8y ago
    I presumed they open sourced it already since the "Maps" app in the fdroid store is the same app just minus some ads or something
    - rmc 8y ago
      The "Maps" app in fdroid[1] is actually a recompilation of Maps.me[2], which is from another company, not Mapbox. [1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ [2] https://maps.me/ https://maps.me/
  - mberg 8y ago
    Mapbox has been pretty strategic about not being perceived to compete with it's developers. Besides creating an amazing stack remaining neutral I think is part of their appeal.
muglug 8y ago
> OSM worked great for me on newly built streets in Cambridge UK, where Google Maps had zero cartography. Cambridge is incredibly atypical, though, given its large number of smart people without much money.
- andygates 8y ago
  New builds are a target of opportunity for local mappers. There only need to be one or two in a medium city to spot these. It's a much more _fun_ activity than, say, maintaining POIs.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago

> 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. There will always be room for individual contributions, because there are things that the big corporations do not care about. For example, many hiking trails and agricultural tracks good for cycling are missing from Google Maps because they simply do not have a business case for those details. Yet they are on OpenStreetMap because when OSM editors actually walk or cycle those ways, they add them to OSM. Another example is opening hours for shops. There are only three ways those can end up on the map: 1) the business itself adds them, 2) a large corporation is aware of them and adds them, or 3) an individual mapper copies them off the sign at the shop’s entrance. For a lot of small shops, only 3 is realistically going to happen.

orblivion 8y ago
Yeah, it also crossed my mind that once the basic stuff is in place, it frees us up to add more of the niche interest stuff.
matt4077 8y ago
I'm pretty sure that Google Maps does auto-discovery of hiking and biking trails by simply watching peoples' positions? At least I've had rather good experiences using Maps for biking. Even small, unofficial paths were mapped, and travel times indicated that Maps had an accurate idea of their condition.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Google's pretty weak for hiking trails in the US in my experience; OSM is far from perfect but it's much better. They're both significantly worse than maps focused on hikers.
  - zylepe 8y ago
    I recently switch https://onthegomap.com https://onthegomap.com from google to OSM for walking paths between points. The trail quality is much better where I live (Massachusetts) but I have been getting a lot of complaints from people all over the world that it no longer has their trails. I wonder what the lowest friction way to get my users to help contribute trails to OSM would be?

sidstling 8y ago

Why wouldn’t it have a future? We use it quite a lot in the European public sector where we can’t use google maps because of privacy issues. We’ve written a small app that does route calculations for us to make reporting business related driving (you get a refund, but that has to be taxed in specific ways) an automated process. We use OSM in that, but we do pay a company to do the routing algorithm and supply the data in a way that doesn’t abuse the standard OSM api. I’m not sure exactly how they do that, I think they host part of OSM or something like that. There is a big industry for small companies which are specialized in those things in Europe, and they are typically cheaper and easier to use than google. We also rely heavily on OSM in our GIS department, where we have our own private maps, though they aren’t so much for traffic we have been building our own “street-view” thing, using OSM and our own 360 images. The disadvantage of OSM is actually the submission process, like if a street is wrong, and you supply the correct information, it’s not always accepted right away. Which is a huge issue if you rely on it for something serious. That hasn’t been an issue for us for two years though, but we did have one week where an elected official couldn’t submit his driving because of a wrong one-way street.

kqr 8y ago
> The disadvantage of OSM is actually the submission process, like if a street is wrong, and you supply the correct information, it’s not always accepted right away. In what way does this happen? I haven't experienced it yet and I get the impression my edits are accepted automatically. Is someone reverting your changes with no good justification?
- sidstling 8y ago
  I had a change denied because I didn’t attach open source evidence, so it was my fault, but because it got contested I couldn’t just redo the change. An account vetting system would solve this. Being an official municipality it’s kind of silly that we can change the actual direction of a street, but not use our internal maps as evidence for it. ;)
  - Freak_NL 8y ago

rmc 8y ago

> 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 There is some opposition within the OSM community from getting big tech corps to do all the work.