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OSM has impressive geographical data now, but in the meantime Google Maps has gone well beyond "we can help you find that street address." Their places data, r
by jfoster 8y ago
OSM has impressive geographical data now, but in the meantime Google Maps has gone well beyond "we can help you find that street address."
Their places data, reviews, photos, navigation, and street view are all adding a massive amount of value. They have shifted the goal posts.
- sapphire_tomb 8y agoI find most of the things you list add no value to me. Photos and reviews are of no interest to me in a navigation aid. In my home town at least (London), I frequently find their places data wrong with marked locations being several streets away from where they actually are. Finally, Street view, which previously I've found super useful, is being ruined in London, as the contractors who are providing the latest updates are phoning it in by submitting reams of data with the pictures taken at night, so you can't see anything in them (flash cameras being a super bad idea for mounting to a car). Edit: I submitted two reports of bad StreetMap pictures a couple of months ago on the issue of the pictures being taken at night. In both cases the bot which handles those reports rejected my categorising them as "of poor quality", and I heard no more about it. But prompted by writing this post, I've just been back to the two locations I reported (on opposite sides of central London, one in Hackney, one in Mayfair), and now find that the StreetMap data is once more pictures taken in daylight. So thanks Google - thanks for telling me I was full of shit, but actually fixing the problem.
- cf 8y agoI think there is a good argument to be made for crowdsourcing some of those as well.
- tzfld 8y ago>Their places data, reviews, photos, navigation, and street view are all adding a massive amount of value. This is where OSM should move.
- mtmail 8y agoThere's https://openstreetcam.org/ https://openstreetcam.org/ and https://www.mapillary.com/ https://www.mapillary.com/ for anybody who want to contribute. It's a huge operational cost to run such a service for free. OSM doesn't run donation campaigns like wikipedia/wikimedia does.
- aw3c2 8y agoNo, OSM should focus on what it is and what it does well. Reviews and photos are bound to attract a lot of garbage and problems. Navigation sure, there is lots of that available on OSM data already. Street view is also already covered by mapilliary and openstreetcam.
- Doctor_Fegg 8y agoOSM's success has largely come from being efficient and focused. Adding photos and Street View would move into areas where the project has no expertise. For navigation, on the other hand, it's already streets ahead (pun unintentional) of Google et al... for those of us who travel on foot or bike, that is!
- JohnFen 8y ago> in the meantime Google Maps has gone well beyond "we can help you find that street address." None of which has any real value to me.