16 ms·

OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities

880 points by clarecorthell 6y ago

clarecorthell 6y ago
Lyft study shows crucial OpenStreetMap road attributes are fresh and high quality in 30 North American cities, as compared to groundtruth. Blog post and paper detail the process, methodology, and results.
advisedwang 6y ago
I'd be really interested in a comparison to other mapping providers. 95% doesn't sound that great in the abstract, but perhaps that's better than the competition?
Ayesh 6y ago
Good that OSM is accurate in cities as well, because in hiking, skiing, or even some ferry routes, OSM simply wins because that's often the only mapping provider to even have _any_ data. Some of my first hand experiences: - French GR-20 routes. Google maps are laughably empty, while OSM has you covered with almost the same information as the hiking maps you can buy on the trail. - Anapurna - similar to GR-20 situation. This route gets changed often due to landslides, but there is always some person doing a great job updating information not too late after. - Volcanoes - OSM maps often contain camping grounds, water sources, etc. This is something I actively contribute too. The level of detail is amazing. Some guides in fact lose potential clients because of this. OSM is a wonderful feat by all its contributors, and isn't appreciated as much as it deserves.
- dharmab 6y ago
  The other great mapping resource is CalTopo (https://caltopo.com https://caltopo.com). Outside did an article on how CalTopo is used by people who work and play outside: https://www.outsideonline.com/2229756/your-navigation-outdated-heres-how-fix-it https://www.outsideonline.com/2229756/your-navigation-outdat...
  - seism 6y ago
    That story (from 2017) is fantastic. CalTopo - and OSM, at best of times - a project of passion. Thanks for sharing!
  - deleted 6y ago
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- ghaff 6y ago
  OSM isn't perfect--especially on trails that aren't official in any way. (Although there are some totally informal trails literally out my door that are far better than you could reasonably expect. And the missing sections are probably on private land which is one reason I haven't filled them in.) But Google seems to have pretty much zero interest in mapping even popular official trails in many cases.
  - roelschroeven 6y ago
    Nothing is perfect, not even official paper maps. I remember a hike we did on holiday in the Drôme department of France when I was a little kid, long before OSM or Google Maps or even Microsoft's Terraserver. Must have been somewhere in the mid to late 80's, I think. We did have a paper map though, and I think it was an official topographic map. We started in one valley and the plan was to hike up the ridge and then down to the neighboring valley, where we knew the Tour De France was going to pass that day. Watching the Tour was not really the main objective, otherwise we would have driven to a more suitable spot by car, but it was an incentive to keep us kids going. In hindsight we could never have made it on time. The map clearly showed paths on both sides of the ridge, and sure enough, walking up the ridge went smoothly (if tiring) along that path. But when we arrived at the top, there was no path down the other side to be seen. There simply wasn't one, and the terrain was not exactly suitable for walking down without a path. The world simply didn't conform to the map. So we stayed there for a while and saw the Tour pass far below us, much too far to recognize anything except the helicopters but even those looked more like flies than helicopters from our high point of view. That wasn't the only time we saw significant differences between French maps and France itself, but it was by far the most memorable one.
    - Loic 6y ago
      For people not knowing it: https://opentopomap.org https://opentopomap.org OpenStreetMap with the traditional topographic view. But I was not able to find where you wanted to hike to see the Tour de France.
      - roelschroeven 6y ago
- thitcanh 6y ago
  Is there an easy way to contribute from my phone? If I could just turn the GPS on and let it track my path I’d be able to contribute all of my random hikes that might not be on OSM.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    OSM discourages adding raw GPS tracks to the map, rather they should only be uploaded to a sort of waiting room hosted on OSM's infrastructure. A GPS track from a phone or unit is something that needs to be carefully examined, compared to other GPS tracks from the region or aerial imagery, and then tweaked and refined. You need to be able to use specialized mapping software properly in order to contribute tracks to OSM. The good news is that the barrier to entry is fairly low for people like you and me on this "news for nerds" site.
  - diggan 6y ago
    There is bunch of suggestions on how to contribute to OSM with your mobile here: https://learnosm.org/en/mobile-mapping/ https://learnosm.org/en/mobile-mapping/ On the left side you have a list of apps/devices with guides and summaries
  - nichos 6y ago
    Street complete (fdroid/playstore or GH) is a very easy way to use your phone to quickly to edits or validate data. https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - maxerickson 6y ago
    You can directly upload GPS traces: https://www.openstreetmap.org/traces https://www.openstreetmap.org/traces That won't get them into the OpenStreetMap database, but it makes them available (if you set them to public) for anyone looking to add the trails. There's also apps like StreetComplete. It has 'challenges', where it prompts you for answers to questions and updates OpenStreetMap accordingly (so what is the surface type of a road, things like that). Vespucci is a full featured editor for Android.
- benjaminclark 6y ago
  These experiences are interesting, but I think Annapurna might not be the right benchmark to evaluate against. One of the least climbed and most deadly mountains on Earth seems rather far from OSM's core use case. It is cool that OSM has the data, but I hope anyone attempting the summit is getting information more directly from other climbers.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - greeneggs 6y ago
    The reference is presumably to hiking the Annapurna Circuit, not for climbing Annapurna itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna_Circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna_Circuit
- lqet 6y ago
  While I agree that OSM is great and highly accurate, I would be careful using it in remote locations where your life may depend on a correct trail. It is very easy to edit OSM (changes are propagated into map tiles after a few minutes), and malicious intent is not immediately spotted. The latter is especially true in remote locations.
  - sorenjan 6y ago
    I usually look at Strava's heatmap when I'm unfamiliar with an area. Chances are if there's a path on the map, it shows up on the heatmap. https://www.strava.com/heatmap https://www.strava.com/heatmap
    - gevz 6y ago
      That is a fantastic idea. Thank you for sharing. I just checked a few trails that were missing in OSM and they all showed up as bright yellow on heatmap.
      - sorenjan 6y ago
        Strava even has their own fork of the OSM online editor iD[0], that uses the heatmap data to align (or "slide" [1]) paths to where people have been. I haven't used it in a while, it was pretty slow when I did and I don't know about licensing etc, but it looks like it still works. So if you want to add the trails you could try it out. [0] https://strava.github.io/iD https://strava.github.io/iD [1] https://labs.strava.com/slide/ https://labs.strava.com/slide/
        reportingsjr 6y ago
        Slide unfortunately hasn't worked for years. Not long after Paul Mach, who created slide, left strava, there was that whole national security incident with the heat map. The heat map was changed to hide military bases, etc, but it broke slide and no one cared enough to fix it.
        6y ago
- m-p-3 6y ago
  It gave my old Garmin GPS a new life, where Garmin stopped providing updated data. A packaged map file with OSM data made it useful again. For those in a similar situation, I use this https://www.openmapchest.org/maps/canada/ https://www.openmapchest.org/maps/canada/
  - habi 6y ago
    For those in a similar situation which want this for Europe, too, use http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl, which has worldwide coverage.
- s0rce 6y ago
  I often notice when OSM is wrong/missing data while hiking and I'll record a trace and update when I get back home. I enjoy contributing but I wish there was a bit more of a community aspect to it (or maybe I simply haven't found that). In some areas the US government agency maps are hilariously out of date or simply completely wrong so OSM is great to able to simply fix it after visiting.
  - matkoniecz 6y ago
    You can find something at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels or https://community.osm.be/ https://community.osm.be/ (click on your area). Personally I follow - global Discord channel (and local one) https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Discord https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Discord - global and local Telegram - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM_centric_Telegram_accounts https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM_centric_Tele... - forum of a local community - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_mailing_list https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_mailing_list (if you enjoy participating in design of tagging schemes) - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk_mailing_list https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk_mailing_list
  - blackboxlogic 6y ago
    I've really enjoyed the community at slack.openstreetmap.us great for finding projects or people to work with. There are local channels!
  - leokennis 6y ago
    For hiking, what I also like to do is add small and "useless" features to the map, that can help navigation. Like, if there is a small open spot or some minor structure in the middle of the woods, I will add it. If someone is walking and not sure if they are still on the right track, they can look around, see the open spot, see the open spot on OSM, and know that they are indeed at that place.
- malloryerik 6y ago
  This is good to hear. Any idea if it's accurate with coastal data? I'm asking for a scientific project that seeks to map the locations of various seaweed strains.
  - teddyh 6y ago
    There’s OpenSeaMap: https://map.openseamap.org/ https://map.openseamap.org/
- jokteur 6y ago
  In my country, there is an amazing government mandated service called Swiss Topo (https://map.geo.admin.ch https://map.geo.admin.ch), which can be accessed freely. Here are some features: - detailed maps from 1:10,000 to 1:1,000,000 - hiking routes which are actively maintained. You can create your own hiking routes, and it will estimate the time that it will take to complete them. - historical data, like historical maps since 1864 and aerial photos - aeronautical maps, naval charts, geological maps, ... - basically any kind of data that you can find on maps, such as land registery, water planning, spatial planning, etc. I am not sure if other countries provide this level of service free of charge. I would be curious to see what other countries offer on this topic.
  - darkfirefly 6y ago
    NSW, Aus offers SIX Maps: https://six.maps.nsw.gov.au https://six.maps.nsw.gov.au (this offers very good imagery of the NSW areas, better than google) That's the easy-to-use-maps. There's also the aus-wide https://nationalmap.gov.au https://nationalmap.gov.au where you get basic satellite maps with the option to add various datasets and even daily maps from Landsat 2A There's also ELVIS foundation spatial data https://elevation.fsdf.org.au https://elevation.fsdf.org.au There's don't really cover hiking trails that much, etc. There's more general purpose mapping applications. It's also possible to find various topographic maps in static form somewhere on the government sites. Councils are the ones that provide the hiking trails, etc. so it depends on the locality. The Northern Beaches council for example provides an interactive trails map, but most have static maps.
    - wildfire 6y ago
      Wow - very interesting. Btw: the URL for Six maps is: https://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/ https://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/ Not sure if it was changed but it took me a few tries to find the right permutation
    - LockAndLol 6y ago
      Those are all government funded and the data is private, correct?
    - 6y ago
- bovine3dom 6y ago
  You can look at French hiking maps online at https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/carte https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/carte - I find it works well for planning a route and then I use OSM when I'm actually doing the hike.
- thrower123 6y ago
  In rural areas of the US, there are some places where OSM data is hilariously bad. At one point they imported a whole bunch of TIGER data that wasn't cleaned up properly, and it's still showing roads that don't exist a decade later. It's a good way to tell if a mapping service is using their own data or just ripping off OSM though.
- dualthro 6y ago
  For volcanoes, what do you mean guides lose potential clients because of this? Like their maps aren't as good as other guides and so people don't hire them? I'm a bit confused.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    With a sufficiently accurate map, hiring a guide is unnecessary. Somewhat similar to the situation with IT, where sufficiently documented software or hardware cuts into consultancy fees.
- mcv 6y ago
  The amount of detail OSM has on Artis, the Amsterdam zoo, is insane. Also, until quite recently (and maybe even still today) Google Map was terrible at bike routes in and around Amsterdam, whereas OSM was excellent at it. I remember how Google ignored major bike routes and tried to send you over highways or footpaths instead. Nowadays they just send you along bike paths next to major car thoroughfares, instead of sending you along the major bike thoroughfare that's discouraged for cars, running parallel to it.
nbar 6y ago
What is the barrier to adding more data? Do they need funds to purchase it from satellite providers?
- Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
  they need more contributors...
  - sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
    My experience with OSM is limited I only contributed a few times to the data in a local city in the Netherlands. I also used the xml data export only a few times for small experiments a long time ago. but from my experience is see the following: * If many people enjoying or live somewhere they will update it very fast and accurate. Way beyond google and apple will ever have. (If a bench is placed somewhere else on a school campus then it will most likely be update within a few days, from my experience at least) * Small structures are detectable on air and satellite images but it is really hard to know what kind of structure it is. * Data from the dutch local governments do, from what I see on OSM, often contain good updates on new buildings. But if something old is changed. (Like a temporary school building is removed then that change is not reflected by a data update from the goverment, and it is often removed by a user after a while) So getting better data from the governments is probably a thing. * A lot of layers are build on top of OSM. For example if a building is easy to use as a person who uses a wheelchair and if there toilet is wheelchair friendly. My ex-girlfriend was in a wheelchair so I used a app for that a lot. But she never used It. They app was very slow and had a strange UI. So changing the data of custom layer on top of OSM with better tools is hopefully going to be a thing. * Users use it mostly because they like to contribute. Google has the power to send many people notification questions about places where they have been. OSM does not have this power. * I would dare to say that OSM is already way more precise then google or apple maps. But users do not always care about that. The big driver for me to keep using google maps is that I often just want to go somewhere, and to go somewhere means that I want to travel by using the train or bus (after covid). In the case i'm in the city I want to know how long it takes to go somewhere by bike or by foot. In the case i'm going to a new city I often want to see how something looks and Google streetview or general images are better then a map. Google prioritizes all that information above having a more accurate map. So no I do not think it's about getting more people involved. I think it's more about what kind of user does the platform want to have.
grecy 6y ago
I used OSM as turn-by turn loaded into my Garmin [1] for my three year drive around Africa, and then to cross North America six times in 2019. I have been utterly staggered how accurate and complete it is in every conceivable scenario - dirt street villages in Sudan and Mali, capital cities in same, capital cities in South Africa and all over the US and Canada. I also used it to drive down through Southern Europe, to cross parts of the Sahara and Namib deserts and even in the mighty Congo it had more detail and info than any other mapping source I've ever seen. My hat is off to the OSM team. [1] loading OSM into a Garmin is a nice easy way to get free routable maps on your dashboard for the entire world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZRQrG6bC3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZRQrG6bC3k
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  I am glad to hear that you found it accurate and complete. I know a lot of mapping of sub-Saharan Africa has been done by foreign armchair mappers working from aerial imagery for e.g. a HOT effort. I myself did a great deal of aerial mapping West African villages in preparation for a trip through the region that I ultimately had to cancel, and I was nervous that without being able to actually verify my edits firsthand, I was introducing some errors.
  - not2b 6y ago
    I used an OSM-based map on my Garmin on trips to India; did five trips to Bangalore and often played tourists on weekends; I had a particular interest in the ancient temples of Karnataka. I used a driver who knew the sites well, but not always perfectly, and the map was a huge help; coverage of roads in rural areas was quite good, not perfect but several times got us around closed roads the driver was familiar with and onto good alternate routes. Not sure how much of the mapping was done from aerial imagery and how much was actual GPS tracking, but it was better than I expected. And this was about 5 years ago.
- Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
  There's a lot of humanitarian groups contributing to OSM. Usually they get to work after natural disasters, so that emergency workers can get around easier.
jqpabc123 6y ago
Apparently, I'm not in the 30 cities that are accurate. Used Magic Earth on my phone which is based on OSM. The very first address I input was off by about a mile. Didn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  To be a little pedantic, converting an address to a location is more of a function of a geocoder, not a function of the map. Software could have a very accurate map, while at the same time using a poor geocoder, so addresses are located incorrectly.
  - npteljes 6y ago
    Not even pedantic, I think it's an important realization. Before knowing OSM, I though of Google Maps as a single service. Not realizing at all that mapping, addresses, POI entries, directions, navigation, etc are huge, separate problem domains. I think parent has the same perception.
- Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
  Address search (geocoding) isn’t what this article is about. OSM by common agreement has a long way to go on that.
  - not2b 6y ago
    Right, but if you're Lyft you have to find people and locations from their addresses.
- emj 6y ago
  That is actually a good point, what happens is that many streets does not have any address points, and your search puts the marker on an arbitrary end of the street, so a mile off sounds about right. Address points are really cumbersome to crowd source, you really need either open data or buy a geocoder. Not easy to do if need to allow everyone to download the data and do what ever they want with it.
exabrial 6y ago
Except my street. No matter how many times I email Lyft support, it always sends them the wrong place. Most Lyft drivers don't read the directions on pickup either explaining the problem. /sigh #FirstWorldProblems
- randoramax 6y ago
  Have you tried fixing the map yourself? It's easy, just like Wikipedia.
  - matkoniecz 6y ago
    As an OSM mapper I would not say that debugging and fixing address issue is easy...
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      It's maybe a little snarky, but the most common issue is relatively straightforward to fix, just add the missing address.
  - chihuahua 6y ago
    That is a nice feature of OSM, and I've done this a few times. But I wonder if there is any propagation delay from OSM to Lyft. When I made some changes to OSM data, I expected the Strava app to pick up the changes for route creation, but they don't receive updates constantly. Instead, it took several months until the changes took effect on Strava.
- clarecorthell 6y ago
  No bothersome problem is too small! If you'd like to share, we would be eager to look into this. Reach us through the app or at osm-questions [a] lyft.com.
  - RicoElectrico 6y ago
    The real problem of GP is with the drivers not reading the note. Each system should have a manual override, Lyft does seem to have one, but the human element failed.
Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
And I helped with that. :)
- npteljes 6y ago
  Me too :) feels great to see the changes online, and then as they propagate to different providers.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
On the other hand, I wonder if OSM's accuracy in Europe has taken a hit in the last year. The lockdowns have led to a wave of bankruptcies of restaurants and fitness centers in several countries, but because mappers are forced to stay home and aren't circulating in the city doing their business, they aren't noticing so much what has changed and removing those POIs from the map. Also, the extremely strict lockdowns in some countries have prevented people from going out for mapping expeditions in the surrounding regions to add missing infrastructure.
- angott 6y ago
  This is an issue with all map services, really. I see the same thing happening on Google and Apple Maps, lots of places that are permanently closed haven't been updated yet.
  - petre 6y ago
    Apple, Amazon, Facebook and MS have been lately contributing a lot to OSM, so what you see on Apple Maps might very well be OSM data. https://joemorrison.medium.com/openstreetmap-is-having-a-moment-dcc7eef1bb01 https://joemorrison.medium.com/openstreetmap-is-having-a-mom...
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Apple Maps has been OpenStreetMap for years.
      - kccqzy 6y ago
        Apple's old map was OpenStreetMap plus other sources but its new ones are proprietary. But its new ones are only available in the US, UK, Canada and Ireland.
        jonas21 6y ago
        I believe the old map was mostly TomTom (TeleAtlas) with a little bit of other sources sprinkled in.
guntars 6y ago
Lyft has access to some pretty good data on where the roads actually are and if there are any closures. Looks like they are already contributing back, which is awesome. Something I've never heard being done, but could be very helpful for cities, is tracking the bumpiness of roads as a metric for road quality. The city could have near real time access to information on where the potholes are. I'd think they'd be willing to pay for it.
- mqus 6y ago
  The wiki states that this data type is being proposed: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Surface_Quality https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Surfac...
  - qwertay 6y ago
    Says the proposal is abandoned in 2011. The thing is OSM does not deal with real time data, the general rule is if the data is likely to change within the next month it doesn't go in OSM. A lot of OSM apps and servers cache the OSM dataset so anything like a road closed for one day would be stale before it even reached users. Thats one of the big issues with OSM though, they have an attitude of "Thats not my problem, it should go in another dataset" but then no one actually has an alternative place to put it so users just miss out.
    - berkes 6y ago
      There are people working on layering the data better. I was at a talk about this at two State of the Map conferences. I don't have links or names ready, on mobile, sorry. The idea, in my words, is to have a standard on how to link between layers: how to merge them, so to say. That way, a routing app for a car would only need the roads and their features layers. But the search engine for tourists needs the poi layer and not all the road details. A 'live' layer for e.g. traffic density could then be a neat commercial product for OSM consumers. But without standards to link your layer to, say, the OSM streets, it is almost impossible to offer and process such a layer.
- 6y ago
dewitt 6y ago
"Road directionality" being only 98.9% accurate seems to be a huge problem for a navigation app!
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  Road directionality is variable over time. I'm not sure at what rate it changes but I bet it's a lot more than 1.1% per year.
  - djrogers 6y ago
    Hmm, I’ve seen maybe a handful of two-way streets change to one-way over my entire life, and have never seen a one-way street change direction. If ~1% of streets changed direction every year, there’d be mass confusion and frustration.
    - jmkb 6y ago
      Mapping OSM in NYC, I've run into about a dozen one-way streets that have changed direction at some point, sometimes for just a block or two.
    - macintux 6y ago
      There’s apparently a trend of converting one-way streets to two-way; cities have realized that one-way streets are a little too efficient, they increase bandwidth but often cities want you to stop and shop. Indianapolis has been moving that direction, at least, but I don’t know how widespread it is.
    - throwaway2245 6y ago
      One major thoroughfare in London changed (if I remember right) from one-way in one direction, to one-way in the other direction, to two-way, in the space of a couple of years. People got used to it very quickly, to the extent that they would not remember the change ever happened. If you have a broad enough roads to have two-way streets everywhere, there's little motivation for it to change. [Edited to note: at the level of individual cities, OSM's directionality was often estimated to be 100% correct] But, with some narrower one-way streets, there becomes a clear motivation to tweak things to improve traffic flows (and also tweak the surrounding two-way streets).
CivBase 6y ago
I've been looking to replace Google Maps with OSM on my smartphone. OSM itself is great, but I've been having a harder time finding a good app to use it with. Is anyone familiar with a good option? I mostly use a maps app for location searches and real-time GPS navigation, but offline maps and location sharing are nice-to-have features. I've been using OsmAnd and it's okay. The interface is pretty good. It supports offline maps, but not location sharing. Map tiles are kind of slow to load compared to Google Maps, which is odd since the tiles have to be downloaded to local storage. The location search often includes redundant results and whatever database they use to store place data is sparse on details like pictures, hours, or reviews. I'll keep using it to stay de-platformed from Google as much as possible, but I'd be willing to pay a bit for something more responsive and polished.
- ashtonbaker 6y ago
  I think Gaia GPS has a free tier? The base map is OSM. I've seen changes that I've made in OSM pulled in within a couple of days. I've gotten a lot of use out of my subscription. I can't speak as much to the location searching capability.
  - leokennis 6y ago
    Love Gaia GPS as well. Location search is hit and miss, but once you're on a trail, it's a flawless app.
- npteljes 6y ago
  I previously had good experience with Maps.me. OsmAnd is great with its myriad settings and such, but somehow is a huge battery drain on my phone. I use it just fine in the background though, because it still provides turn by turn navigation that way. I think OsmAnd doesn't use generated tiles, but rather generates the map on the fly, hence the slowness.
- Nrbelex 6y ago
  Check out mapy.cz [1] or an ad-free version from Windy [2]. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy&utm_source=mapy_mobilni_web&utm_medium=banner_responziv&utm_campaign=responziv_appinstall https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.windymaps https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.wind...
Cshelton 6y ago
Unfortunately, working in the Commercial Real Estate world, OSM is no where close when doing a forward geocode... around the block is not close enough. Only ones accurate enough are Google (won't use) and Mapbox.
- olejorgenb 6y ago
  I thought mapbox used openstreetmap data?
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Not exclusively. They probably dump OpenAddresses data (or something similar) into their geocoder. https://openaddresses.io/ https://openaddresses.io/
    - juliansimioni 6y ago
      Hi, founder of Geocode Earth (https://geocode.earth https://geocode.earth), another geocoding service that _does_ use OpenAddresses and only other open data sets. Mapbox purchases data from, I believe, TomTom, and other proprietary sources. That's why they have cheap(er) pricing if you want to get results without the legal ability to store them, and much more expensive pricing if you do want to store it. I'm sure negotiating that arrangement with the proprietary address data vendors was...fun.
      - maxerickson 6y ago
        That seems like it could just be an up charge. (or a discount for the ephemeral results if you want to look at it that way)
      - Cshelton 6y ago
        Yup, we pay them quite a bit to be able to store it.
      - jillesvangurp 6y ago
        A friend of mine runs opencage, which is a geocoder based on open streetmaps and a few other data sets. They got a lot more business when Google raised their prices a while back. Anyway, go give them some love if you need a geocoder because they are an awesome small company with a great service. Their freemium layer is also pretty generous. Nominatim is the defactor open streetmaps geocoder but its weakness is that it relies on only that; so it is only as good as OSM is. Geocoding is a surprisingly hard problem to solve with and without open data. Picking apart text strings into unambiguous addresses is just super hard with all the conventions for this around the world. One area open streetmaps is still inconsistent is house numbers and postal codes. Getting solid open data for that is just hard in some places.
nix23 6y ago
A friend and i where once on a mission, making bike-tours in the swiss mountains every weekend, and map every forgotten water-fountain in villages we crossed, great fun!
dawnerd 6y ago
Now if only there was a sensible way to self-host OSM data. From what I've found you either have to build a dedicated server to continuously building the tiles (which takes a ton of storage and processing power) or pay for it at an insane monthly price. I wish OSM would directly make their tiles available to mirror. (Maybe they do, but I haven't found it yet)
- npteljes 6y ago
  I just looked it up and apparently, all tiles would take up 54 TB[0], and even just the important tiles are around 1TB. I now understand why just downloading them isn't an option. [0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_disk_usage https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_disk_usage
  - walrus01 6y ago
    It specifically says: OSM does NOT pre-render every tile. Pre-rendering all tiles would use around 54 TB of storage that 54TB figure is only if you pre-render into raster every zoom level of every tile for the whole world. a more typical self hosted openstreetmap renders the tiles on demand as you scroll or move the map. Disk space usage is MUCH less, such that my test/development setup fits well on a virtual machine with 300GB of disk space on a 12TB hard drive that cost $145. By this measurement I believe it's using just under 4 dollars of disk space, 8 dollars if you count its duplicate where it gets backed up to.
    - npteljes 6y ago
      Maybe the tileset could be distributed via torrent, like how they distribute the main dataset.
      - walrus01 6y ago
        that would be a bad idea since the tiles are ever changing. the master copy of the data is in a vector format. the idea is you want to run the (free) software engine that turns the vector data into various zoom levels of raster tiles, on demand. the vector data is really quite small, an entire large-population US state with many complex cities is under a few hundred megabytes.
einpoklum 6y ago
Google Maps is funded by corporations who want to mine your data and sell you stuff, whether you need it or not. OpenStreetMaps is funded by... well, actually, it's complicated. There are lots of individual donations, but there is also money by Amazon, Facebook and Apple. And some other corporations. Regardless - consider making a donation: https://donate.openstreetmap.org/ https://donate.openstreetmap.org/ I would also entreat you to ask OSM to get off corporate funding. And of course, if you can, contribute map data about where you live.
sschueller 6y ago
Mapping should be something done by the government. They know the most (construction plans etc) and they need to do it anyway. The data should then be available to anyone who needs it.
- Madzen__ 6y ago
  Is that not common in other countries? In Norway we have Kartverket[1] which maps all properties, trails, ports and roads. [1] https://www.kartverket.no/en https://www.kartverket.no/en
- lucb1e 6y ago
  Dutch government does this partially. That's how OSM got some great address location and house outline data in the Netherlands :) OSM worldwide is a mix of open datasets and original data. We'd not be as complete if one of those two were missing.
qwerty456127 6y ago
I've just checked (some years have passes since the last time) and it seems improved a lot for Europe too. I personally am not really interested in geospatial precision, I mostly use public transport so I need all the bus/tram/etc stops placed and named accurately.
radicaldreamer 6y ago
What is the best-in-class iOS app using OpenStreetMap? For iPhone, MagicEarth looks extremely good (https://www.magicearth.com/ https://www.magicearth.com/), but I'm wondering if people have other recommendations...
- Terretta 6y ago
  Arguably, “Windy Maps” is up there: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-maps/id1201228182 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-maps/id1201228182 Same devs as the stunning https://www.windy.com/ https://www.windy.com/ weather site which also has an app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-com/id1161387262 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-com/id1161387262 If you're more about hiking, maybe “Gaia GPS Hiking, Offroad Maps”: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gaia-gps-hiking-offroad-maps/id1201979492 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gaia-gps-hiking-offroad-maps/i...
- tppiotrowski 6y ago
  I have been using maps.me for about 5 years. It is becoming more and more commercialized but it's fast and has a simple interface.
  - blendergeek 6y ago
    Maps.me was recently purchased by a weird payments company and replaced with a generic reference MapBox OSM app. This might have been reverted later but it was big on HN a few weeks ago.
    - andrewshadura 6y ago
      It was reverted, but a fork started nevertheless, OMaps, currently in an early stages of development. https://github.com/omapsapp https://github.com/omapsapp Matrix chat: https://matrix.to/#/#omapsapp:matrix.org?via=matrix.org&via=gitter.im https://matrix.to/#/#omapsapp:matrix.org?via=matrix.org&via=...
- blendergeek 6y ago
  Have you tried OsmAnd? Their iOS offering has gotten fairly good recently. It does cost a small amount of money to get the full version. The free version is complete (it is only limited in how many regions you can download) and more than useful for trying it out.
tracerbulletx 6y ago
As Google has lost it's sheen of benevolence over the last decade public knowledge projects like this become ever more appealing. Wikipedia proves they can be wildly successful all without capital investment and the perverse incentives that follow.
- HotVector 6y ago
  I used to think Google was the "good guy" by providing so many resources for free, but I've realized how they've exploited their market dominance by essentially manipulating the masses with their ad service. We need to move away from conglomerates and start using software that doesn't sell your soul to the devil.
  - blackboxlogic 6y ago
    I thought I was helping the world by fixing things on google maps. That will be a perpetual reminder for how naive I can be.
    - themeiguoren 6y ago
      You were helping google, but you were also helping everyone who used their maps from that day into the future. Your comment gives off the air of someone upset they helped the wrong party in a zero-sum game. IMO, this is clearly a positive sum one, and you shouldn’t despair at improving little corners of the world just because actors you don’t like will also benefit.
      - blackboxlogic 6y ago
        I DO see it as zero sum. OSM and Google maps compete for a limited supply of users. It's the "wrong" team because when Google gets users, they make money. When OSM gets users, the map gets better and people are freer from abuse and manipulation.
        thinkingemote 6y ago
lindner 6y ago
One thing that someone might consider is working with Data Portability laws to allow for export of user contributed data to corporate map platforms. I'd like to add my Google Maps contributions to OSM I'm a Level 7 local guide there and was an active user of MapMaker back in the day..
- jakecopp 6y ago
  Which sort of contributions would you like to copy from Google Maps to OSM? If you personally surveyed these places you can go to OpenStreetMap.org, sign in and then you can add your changes - OSM may already have the info so a straight import wouldn't be possible. Make sure not to copy any of Google's details to OSM that you didn't personally survey as that would violate copyright. Please reach out to me if you'd like a hand with getting started mapping on OSM :)
  - lindner 6y ago
    Wrong answer.. This effort does not scale. You want to make it such that facts added by anyone can be easily imported with a simple opt-in. GDPR data portability could be expanded to include defined formats for export so that import can be done in an automated fashion.
    - jakecopp 6y ago
      > Wrong answer.. That comment doesn't provide any value. > You want to make it such that facts added by anyone can be easily imported with a simple opt-in. OpenStreetMap is much larger than just me or one company. > GDPR data portability could be expanded to include defined formats for export so that import can be done in an automated fashion. Imports are not an easy problem - how do you deal with conflicts? How to verify which data is more accurate? Imports are supported, and there is a detailed process for them to make sure OpenStreetMap stays well maintained: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines
- wraptile 6y ago
  Google map reviews is the only thing keeping me from OSM based maps. I love to explore, take photos and review places. OsmAnd has some review functionality but it's very barebones unfortunately.
hutch120 6y ago
I think this adds to the case for Rousseau's Theory of human nature... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Not just in US.. Here in Spain too. It's really great. Especially niche things like walking tracks are super accurate whereas on Google Maps I'm walking in one big grey square :D
post_break 6y ago
Is this because Google has increased the api pricing and people have switched to OSM?
- lucb1e 6y ago
  If at all, then only as an indirect effect. I haven't really noticed an uptick in contributors since then. There has been more publicity and more people using it (and abusing the community-run openstreetmap.org tile servers for commercial purposes²). ² It's fine to use OSM for commercial purposes, but hosting the tiles costs bandwidth and computational power. Embedding the community servers in your taxi tracking product and refreshing the page and map background every second is just a dick move.
deleted 6y ago
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at_a_remove 6y ago
I have been considering looking at OSM as "yet another data source" for my maps, but overall I run into the highly abstract issue of comparison: how do I know that two segments (one from say OSM, one from perhaps the county) reference the same stretch of street for comparison? Even the slightest nudge of a single coordinate point on the line would mean that they were not geometrically identical, so I would not know to compare their attributes. Names are almost laughably bad for this purpose, for having multiple forms ("N SECOND ST" vs "NORTH 2ND STREET") and for being terrifying vague (so many, many Main Streets). Worse yet, a given segment might be split at a point not an intersection (speed change occurs here, municipality change, directionality change, road type change, etc) so I cannot even rely on those. And it is entirely possible for different maps to include a driveway, splitting a street at that point, while another does not, leaving it continuous. Large-scale automated comparison of this kind of thing is challenging.
- galimaufry 6y ago
  > Names are almost laughably bad for this purpose, for having multiple forms ("N SECOND ST" vs "NORTH 2ND STREET") and for being terrifying vague (so many, many Main Streets). libpostal (open source, open data location parser) might help with this. Between using it to parse the name, and supplementing this with the city name (using reverse geocode with imprecise coordinates), you might be able to get something useful.
- juliansimioni 6y ago
  One of the under-appreciated advantages OSM has here is that they have a fairly well enforced convention of using fully expanded abbreviations in addresses and street names. It's _much_ easier for automated comparison to replace `street` with `st` than it is to guess which one of many possible expansions to replace `st` with (is it saint? street? sankt? strasse?). This isn't foolproof but much of the "authoritative" data out there has no such convention, making analysis much more dangerous.
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    Oh, cramming the names into a common format is something I have under my belt, but there are additional wrinkles and, worse yet, local bizarreness (aka "historical convention"). The names are the least of it, really, even if they are ... odd.
jonathan_app 6y ago
OSM is usually quite good. My colleagues simulated nationwide travel using OSM roads: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337332041_Agent-based_modeling_to_simulate_road_travel_using_Big_Data_from_smartphone_GPS_An_application_to_the_continental_United_States https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337332041_Agent-bas...
WaitWaitWha 6y ago
OSM is lovely, except for the UI. It is way over complicated.
- jakecopp 6y ago
  Which UI do you mean? The project is much larger than the frontend at OpenStreetMap.org - I agree that could do with some work :)
- aendruk 6y ago
  The thing is it doesn’t really have a UI; it’s just a database that people can do what they want with. The interfaces that you see—even on the OSM website—are a myriad of separate projects.
sabujp 6y ago
this is an excellent design interview question
mch82 6y ago
What small, growing companies are in the general field of mapping? Are there companies that fund employees to work on Open Street Maps?
- habi 6y ago
  Not only small companies do, but big ones, too: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/
dylan604 6y ago
I don't know which mapping options Lyft/Uber/etc use, but in my neighborhood, Google Maps has given street names to the allies behind people's houses. You can tell the drivers that have a clue, and will realize they should not turn down an alley. Drivers that are less cognizant of how the world works, follow the instructions dutifully, and waste time trying to figure out why everyone is confused.
visarga 6y ago
Off topic - is there a way to get an index of all businesses in OSM (restaurants, hotels, shops, etc)? I need the data for training a NLP model.
- jaimex2 6y ago
  Yeah, http://overpass-turbo.eu/ http://overpass-turbo.eu/ use the wizard.
Brakenshire 6y ago
The problem I have with OpenStreetMap is the license, it seems you can use an OSM derived base map and then layer anything else on top without problems, but you cannot process the data or mix in proprietary data without releasing the algorithm or the final dataset. So any competitive advantage derived from processing the data has to be immediately made open. So you see a lot of use of OSM as a base map, but very little use as a mapping database for commercial applications. I see why they did this, to prevent companies taking their data to bootstrap a closed competitor, but the consequence is that the data is locked in and is getting much less use than you’d hope as a database.
- RicoElectrico 6y ago
  Can you elaborate where license would be a problem? Keep in mind this: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidelines https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidel... Which eases the issue a little bit. For instance, MS uses OSM buildings for Bing Maps. Or Apple uses OSM for road data in selected countries (Ukraine?)
  - Brakenshire 6y ago
    I’ll give a contrived example, say you’re a property startup, and you want to produce a walkability rating for each house you sell. You might want to do a calculation on OSM for restaurants within 5 minutes walk, maybe a chef rating for whether there’s a greengrocer, fishmonger, delicatessen and butcher within walking distance, or you want to take into account a walk back from the train station and the opening times to see whether the shops are still open after someone comes back from their commute. This is the kind of thing which would be interesting for big cities with a lot of commuting by public transport. My understanding is if you did this with OSM data you’d either have to make the algorithm that did the calculation public, or the output dataset (locations as keys and the final ratings for each as values). OSM has exceptions for horizontal slicing (layer separate data on top of an OSM basemap), for vertical slicing (union OSM data with separate data) and for trivial manipulations, but it seems it doesn’t if you do this kind of non-trivial processing of OSM data. So that means that it’s almost impossible for a company to find an interesting way of processing the data which can give them an advantage over a direct competitor, and there’s no real incentive to do so. This is my reading of the terms from a few months back, hopefully I’m wrong about it. But I suspect this is why it’s rare to see the data being used like this.
technotarek 6y ago
Can anyone recommend an OSM based turn-by-turn, iOS app that is CarPlay compatible?
- habi 6y ago
  https://www.magicearth.com/support/using-carplay/ https://www.magicearth.com/support/using-carplay/
racuna 6y ago
I used it while backpacking across Europe back in 2019. Very useful when I was offline. But a lot of building numbers were missed. So I had to use Google Maps when I had Internet connection.
known 6y ago
Wish Google MAPS and OSM share data with each other;
- lucb1e 6y ago
  I wish that too! The OSM data license is similar to GPL in that it requires, when mixed, the resulting derived work to still be shared in an open license. Having Google's data to complement OSM's would be a huge benefit for researchers that can use geographical data for all sorts of purposes, users of course, everyone really. As someone who contributes to OpenStreetMap and avoids Google Maps (for privacy reasons, not map reasons), I have nothing but respect for how much data they gathered. I'm just sad they keep it locked up.
rainbowzootsuit 6y ago
I took my honeymoon trip to New Zealand almost a decade ago using a Garmin gps and a map I made myself from the OSM database flashed on an SD card. It worked great.
csharptwdec19 6y ago
When I worked in HFC/Fiber Design (and automation via code), we tried looking into OSM as a replacement for our workflows that used google earth and hack on top of hack (Google earth kept removing parts of the API that were useful for automation/semi-automation, at least I got to learn lots about P/Invoke I guess?) Back then, it unfortunately wasn't usable for us, but I kept the research bits aside just in case when I left the job in 2013. When I spoke with someone still at that company a few months ago, I learned that over the years OSM had evolved/matured enough that they were using it far more than google earth. I miss GIS/Mapping. It's great to see it is still a collaborative community. :)

880 points by clarecorthell 6y ago

Lyft study shows crucial OpenStreetMap road attributes are fresh and high quality in 30 North American cities, as compared to groundtruth. Blog post and paper detail the process, methodology, and results.

advisedwang 6y ago

I'd be really interested in a comparison to other mapping providers. 95% doesn't sound that great in the abstract, but perhaps that's better than the competition?

Ayesh 6y ago

Good that OSM is accurate in cities as well, because in hiking, skiing, or even some ferry routes, OSM simply wins because that's often the only mapping provider to even have _any_ data. Some of my first hand experiences: - French GR-20 routes. Google maps are laughably empty, while OSM has you covered with almost the same information as the hiking maps you can buy on the trail. - Anapurna - similar to GR-20 situation. This route gets changed often due to landslides, but there is always some person doing a great job updating information not too late after. - Volcanoes - OSM maps often contain camping grounds, water sources, etc. This is something I actively contribute too. The level of detail is amazing. Some guides in fact lose potential clients because of this. OSM is a wonderful feat by all its contributors, and isn't appreciated as much as it deserves.

dharmab 6y ago
The other great mapping resource is CalTopo (https://caltopo.com https://caltopo.com). Outside did an article on how CalTopo is used by people who work and play outside: https://www.outsideonline.com/2229756/your-navigation-outdated-heres-how-fix-it https://www.outsideonline.com/2229756/your-navigation-outdat...
- seism 6y ago
  That story (from 2017) is fantastic. CalTopo - and OSM, at best of times - a project of passion. Thanks for sharing!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ghaff 6y ago
OSM isn't perfect--especially on trails that aren't official in any way. (Although there are some totally informal trails literally out my door that are far better than you could reasonably expect. And the missing sections are probably on private land which is one reason I haven't filled them in.) But Google seems to have pretty much zero interest in mapping even popular official trails in many cases.
- roelschroeven 6y ago
  Nothing is perfect, not even official paper maps. I remember a hike we did on holiday in the Drôme department of France when I was a little kid, long before OSM or Google Maps or even Microsoft's Terraserver. Must have been somewhere in the mid to late 80's, I think. We did have a paper map though, and I think it was an official topographic map. We started in one valley and the plan was to hike up the ridge and then down to the neighboring valley, where we knew the Tour De France was going to pass that day. Watching the Tour was not really the main objective, otherwise we would have driven to a more suitable spot by car, but it was an incentive to keep us kids going. In hindsight we could never have made it on time. The map clearly showed paths on both sides of the ridge, and sure enough, walking up the ridge went smoothly (if tiring) along that path. But when we arrived at the top, there was no path down the other side to be seen. There simply wasn't one, and the terrain was not exactly suitable for walking down without a path. The world simply didn't conform to the map. So we stayed there for a while and saw the Tour pass far below us, much too far to recognize anything except the helicopters but even those looked more like flies than helicopters from our high point of view. That wasn't the only time we saw significant differences between French maps and France itself, but it was by far the most memorable one.
  - Loic 6y ago
    For people not knowing it: https://opentopomap.org https://opentopomap.org OpenStreetMap with the traditional topographic view. But I was not able to find where you wanted to hike to see the Tour de France.
    - roelschroeven 6y ago
thitcanh 6y ago
Is there an easy way to contribute from my phone? If I could just turn the GPS on and let it track my path I’d be able to contribute all of my random hikes that might not be on OSM.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  OSM discourages adding raw GPS tracks to the map, rather they should only be uploaded to a sort of waiting room hosted on OSM's infrastructure. A GPS track from a phone or unit is something that needs to be carefully examined, compared to other GPS tracks from the region or aerial imagery, and then tweaked and refined. You need to be able to use specialized mapping software properly in order to contribute tracks to OSM. The good news is that the barrier to entry is fairly low for people like you and me on this "news for nerds" site.
- diggan 6y ago
  There is bunch of suggestions on how to contribute to OSM with your mobile here: https://learnosm.org/en/mobile-mapping/ https://learnosm.org/en/mobile-mapping/ On the left side you have a list of apps/devices with guides and summaries
- nichos 6y ago
  Street complete (fdroid/playstore or GH) is a very easy way to use your phone to quickly to edits or validate data. https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- maxerickson 6y ago
  You can directly upload GPS traces: https://www.openstreetmap.org/traces https://www.openstreetmap.org/traces That won't get them into the OpenStreetMap database, but it makes them available (if you set them to public) for anyone looking to add the trails. There's also apps like StreetComplete. It has 'challenges', where it prompts you for answers to questions and updates OpenStreetMap accordingly (so what is the surface type of a road, things like that). Vespucci is a full featured editor for Android.
benjaminclark 6y ago
These experiences are interesting, but I think Annapurna might not be the right benchmark to evaluate against. One of the least climbed and most deadly mountains on Earth seems rather far from OSM's core use case. It is cool that OSM has the data, but I hope anyone attempting the summit is getting information more directly from other climbers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- greeneggs 6y ago
  The reference is presumably to hiking the Annapurna Circuit, not for climbing Annapurna itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna_Circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna_Circuit
lqet 6y ago
While I agree that OSM is great and highly accurate, I would be careful using it in remote locations where your life may depend on a correct trail. It is very easy to edit OSM (changes are propagated into map tiles after a few minutes), and malicious intent is not immediately spotted. The latter is especially true in remote locations.
- sorenjan 6y ago
  I usually look at Strava's heatmap when I'm unfamiliar with an area. Chances are if there's a path on the map, it shows up on the heatmap. https://www.strava.com/heatmap https://www.strava.com/heatmap
  - gevz 6y ago
    That is a fantastic idea. Thank you for sharing. I just checked a few trails that were missing in OSM and they all showed up as bright yellow on heatmap.
    - sorenjan 6y ago
      Strava even has their own fork of the OSM online editor iD[0], that uses the heatmap data to align (or "slide" [1]) paths to where people have been. I haven't used it in a while, it was pretty slow when I did and I don't know about licensing etc, but it looks like it still works. So if you want to add the trails you could try it out. [0] https://strava.github.io/iD https://strava.github.io/iD [1] https://labs.strava.com/slide/ https://labs.strava.com/slide/
      - reportingsjr 6y ago
        Slide unfortunately hasn't worked for years. Not long after Paul Mach, who created slide, left strava, there was that whole national security incident with the heat map. The heat map was changed to hide military bases, etc, but it broke slide and no one cared enough to fix it.
        6y ago
m-p-3 6y ago
It gave my old Garmin GPS a new life, where Garmin stopped providing updated data. A packaged map file with OSM data made it useful again. For those in a similar situation, I use this https://www.openmapchest.org/maps/canada/ https://www.openmapchest.org/maps/canada/
- habi 6y ago
  For those in a similar situation which want this for Europe, too, use http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl, which has worldwide coverage.
s0rce 6y ago
I often notice when OSM is wrong/missing data while hiking and I'll record a trace and update when I get back home. I enjoy contributing but I wish there was a bit more of a community aspect to it (or maybe I simply haven't found that). In some areas the US government agency maps are hilariously out of date or simply completely wrong so OSM is great to able to simply fix it after visiting.
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  You can find something at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels or https://community.osm.be/ https://community.osm.be/ (click on your area). Personally I follow - global Discord channel (and local one) https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Discord https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Discord - global and local Telegram - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM_centric_Telegram_accounts https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM_centric_Tele... - forum of a local community - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_mailing_list https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_mailing_list (if you enjoy participating in design of tagging schemes) - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk_mailing_list https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk_mailing_list
- blackboxlogic 6y ago
  I've really enjoyed the community at slack.openstreetmap.us great for finding projects or people to work with. There are local channels!
- leokennis 6y ago
  For hiking, what I also like to do is add small and "useless" features to the map, that can help navigation. Like, if there is a small open spot or some minor structure in the middle of the woods, I will add it. If someone is walking and not sure if they are still on the right track, they can look around, see the open spot, see the open spot on OSM, and know that they are indeed at that place.
malloryerik 6y ago
This is good to hear. Any idea if it's accurate with coastal data? I'm asking for a scientific project that seeks to map the locations of various seaweed strains.
- teddyh 6y ago
  There’s OpenSeaMap: https://map.openseamap.org/ https://map.openseamap.org/
jokteur 6y ago
In my country, there is an amazing government mandated service called Swiss Topo (https://map.geo.admin.ch https://map.geo.admin.ch), which can be accessed freely. Here are some features: - detailed maps from 1:10,000 to 1:1,000,000 - hiking routes which are actively maintained. You can create your own hiking routes, and it will estimate the time that it will take to complete them. - historical data, like historical maps since 1864 and aerial photos - aeronautical maps, naval charts, geological maps, ... - basically any kind of data that you can find on maps, such as land registery, water planning, spatial planning, etc. I am not sure if other countries provide this level of service free of charge. I would be curious to see what other countries offer on this topic.
- darkfirefly 6y ago
  NSW, Aus offers SIX Maps: https://six.maps.nsw.gov.au https://six.maps.nsw.gov.au (this offers very good imagery of the NSW areas, better than google) That's the easy-to-use-maps. There's also the aus-wide https://nationalmap.gov.au https://nationalmap.gov.au where you get basic satellite maps with the option to add various datasets and even daily maps from Landsat 2A There's also ELVIS foundation spatial data https://elevation.fsdf.org.au https://elevation.fsdf.org.au There's don't really cover hiking trails that much, etc. There's more general purpose mapping applications. It's also possible to find various topographic maps in static form somewhere on the government sites. Councils are the ones that provide the hiking trails, etc. so it depends on the locality. The Northern Beaches council for example provides an interactive trails map, but most have static maps.
  - wildfire 6y ago
    Wow - very interesting. Btw: the URL for Six maps is: https://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/ https://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/ Not sure if it was changed but it took me a few tries to find the right permutation
  - LockAndLol 6y ago
    Those are all government funded and the data is private, correct?
  - 6y ago
bovine3dom 6y ago
You can look at French hiking maps online at https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/carte https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/carte - I find it works well for planning a route and then I use OSM when I'm actually doing the hike.
thrower123 6y ago
In rural areas of the US, there are some places where OSM data is hilariously bad. At one point they imported a whole bunch of TIGER data that wasn't cleaned up properly, and it's still showing roads that don't exist a decade later. It's a good way to tell if a mapping service is using their own data or just ripping off OSM though.
dualthro 6y ago
For volcanoes, what do you mean guides lose potential clients because of this? Like their maps aren't as good as other guides and so people don't hire them? I'm a bit confused.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  With a sufficiently accurate map, hiring a guide is unnecessary. Somewhat similar to the situation with IT, where sufficiently documented software or hardware cuts into consultancy fees.
mcv 6y ago
The amount of detail OSM has on Artis, the Amsterdam zoo, is insane. Also, until quite recently (and maybe even still today) Google Map was terrible at bike routes in and around Amsterdam, whereas OSM was excellent at it. I remember how Google ignored major bike routes and tried to send you over highways or footpaths instead. Nowadays they just send you along bike paths next to major car thoroughfares, instead of sending you along the major bike thoroughfare that's discouraged for cars, running parallel to it.

nbar 6y ago

What is the barrier to adding more data? Do they need funds to purchase it from satellite providers?

Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
they need more contributors...
- sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
  My experience with OSM is limited I only contributed a few times to the data in a local city in the Netherlands. I also used the xml data export only a few times for small experiments a long time ago. but from my experience is see the following: * If many people enjoying or live somewhere they will update it very fast and accurate. Way beyond google and apple will ever have. (If a bench is placed somewhere else on a school campus then it will most likely be update within a few days, from my experience at least) * Small structures are detectable on air and satellite images but it is really hard to know what kind of structure it is. * Data from the dutch local governments do, from what I see on OSM, often contain good updates on new buildings. But if something old is changed. (Like a temporary school building is removed then that change is not reflected by a data update from the goverment, and it is often removed by a user after a while) So getting better data from the governments is probably a thing. * A lot of layers are build on top of OSM. For example if a building is easy to use as a person who uses a wheelchair and if there toilet is wheelchair friendly. My ex-girlfriend was in a wheelchair so I used a app for that a lot. But she never used It. They app was very slow and had a strange UI. So changing the data of custom layer on top of OSM with better tools is hopefully going to be a thing. * Users use it mostly because they like to contribute. Google has the power to send many people notification questions about places where they have been. OSM does not have this power. * I would dare to say that OSM is already way more precise then google or apple maps. But users do not always care about that. The big driver for me to keep using google maps is that I often just want to go somewhere, and to go somewhere means that I want to travel by using the train or bus (after covid). In the case i'm in the city I want to know how long it takes to go somewhere by bike or by foot. In the case i'm going to a new city I often want to see how something looks and Google streetview or general images are better then a map. Google prioritizes all that information above having a more accurate map. So no I do not think it's about getting more people involved. I think it's more about what kind of user does the platform want to have.

grecy 6y ago

I used OSM as turn-by turn loaded into my Garmin [1] for my three year drive around Africa, and then to cross North America six times in 2019. I have been utterly staggered how accurate and complete it is in every conceivable scenario - dirt street villages in Sudan and Mali, capital cities in same, capital cities in South Africa and all over the US and Canada. I also used it to drive down through Southern Europe, to cross parts of the Sahara and Namib deserts and even in the mighty Congo it had more detail and info than any other mapping source I've ever seen. My hat is off to the OSM team. [1] loading OSM into a Garmin is a nice easy way to get free routable maps on your dashboard for the entire world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZRQrG6bC3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZRQrG6bC3k

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I am glad to hear that you found it accurate and complete. I know a lot of mapping of sub-Saharan Africa has been done by foreign armchair mappers working from aerial imagery for e.g. a HOT effort. I myself did a great deal of aerial mapping West African villages in preparation for a trip through the region that I ultimately had to cancel, and I was nervous that without being able to actually verify my edits firsthand, I was introducing some errors.
- not2b 6y ago
  I used an OSM-based map on my Garmin on trips to India; did five trips to Bangalore and often played tourists on weekends; I had a particular interest in the ancient temples of Karnataka. I used a driver who knew the sites well, but not always perfectly, and the map was a huge help; coverage of roads in rural areas was quite good, not perfect but several times got us around closed roads the driver was familiar with and onto good alternate routes. Not sure how much of the mapping was done from aerial imagery and how much was actual GPS tracking, but it was better than I expected. And this was about 5 years ago.
Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
There's a lot of humanitarian groups contributing to OSM. Usually they get to work after natural disasters, so that emergency workers can get around easier.

jqpabc123 6y ago

Apparently, I'm not in the 30 cities that are accurate. Used Magic Earth on my phone which is based on OSM. The very first address I input was off by about a mile. Didn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence.

ryandrake 6y ago
To be a little pedantic, converting an address to a location is more of a function of a geocoder, not a function of the map. Software could have a very accurate map, while at the same time using a poor geocoder, so addresses are located incorrectly.
- npteljes 6y ago
  Not even pedantic, I think it's an important realization. Before knowing OSM, I though of Google Maps as a single service. Not realizing at all that mapping, addresses, POI entries, directions, navigation, etc are huge, separate problem domains. I think parent has the same perception.
Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
Address search (geocoding) isn’t what this article is about. OSM by common agreement has a long way to go on that.
- not2b 6y ago
  Right, but if you're Lyft you have to find people and locations from their addresses.
emj 6y ago
That is actually a good point, what happens is that many streets does not have any address points, and your search puts the marker on an arbitrary end of the street, so a mile off sounds about right. Address points are really cumbersome to crowd source, you really need either open data or buy a geocoder. Not easy to do if need to allow everyone to download the data and do what ever they want with it.

exabrial 6y ago

Except my street. No matter how many times I email Lyft support, it always sends them the wrong place. Most Lyft drivers don't read the directions on pickup either explaining the problem. /sigh #FirstWorldProblems

randoramax 6y ago
Have you tried fixing the map yourself? It's easy, just like Wikipedia.
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  As an OSM mapper I would not say that debugging and fixing address issue is easy...
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    It's maybe a little snarky, but the most common issue is relatively straightforward to fix, just add the missing address.
- chihuahua 6y ago
  That is a nice feature of OSM, and I've done this a few times. But I wonder if there is any propagation delay from OSM to Lyft. When I made some changes to OSM data, I expected the Strava app to pick up the changes for route creation, but they don't receive updates constantly. Instead, it took several months until the changes took effect on Strava.
clarecorthell 6y ago
No bothersome problem is too small! If you'd like to share, we would be eager to look into this. Reach us through the app or at osm-questions [a] lyft.com.
- RicoElectrico 6y ago
  The real problem of GP is with the drivers not reading the note. Each system should have a manual override, Lyft does seem to have one, but the human element failed.

Acrobatic_Road 6y ago

And I helped with that. :)

npteljes 6y ago
Me too :) feels great to see the changes online, and then as they propagate to different providers.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

On the other hand, I wonder if OSM's accuracy in Europe has taken a hit in the last year. The lockdowns have led to a wave of bankruptcies of restaurants and fitness centers in several countries, but because mappers are forced to stay home and aren't circulating in the city doing their business, they aren't noticing so much what has changed and removing those POIs from the map. Also, the extremely strict lockdowns in some countries have prevented people from going out for mapping expeditions in the surrounding regions to add missing infrastructure.

angott 6y ago
This is an issue with all map services, really. I see the same thing happening on Google and Apple Maps, lots of places that are permanently closed haven't been updated yet.
- petre 6y ago
  Apple, Amazon, Facebook and MS have been lately contributing a lot to OSM, so what you see on Apple Maps might very well be OSM data. https://joemorrison.medium.com/openstreetmap-is-having-a-moment-dcc7eef1bb01 https://joemorrison.medium.com/openstreetmap-is-having-a-mom...
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Apple Maps has been OpenStreetMap for years.
    - kccqzy 6y ago
      Apple's old map was OpenStreetMap plus other sources but its new ones are proprietary. But its new ones are only available in the US, UK, Canada and Ireland.
      - jonas21 6y ago
        I believe the old map was mostly TomTom (TeleAtlas) with a little bit of other sources sprinkled in.

guntars 6y ago

Lyft has access to some pretty good data on where the roads actually are and if there are any closures. Looks like they are already contributing back, which is awesome. Something I've never heard being done, but could be very helpful for cities, is tracking the bumpiness of roads as a metric for road quality. The city could have near real time access to information on where the potholes are. I'd think they'd be willing to pay for it.

mqus 6y ago
The wiki states that this data type is being proposed: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Surface_Quality https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Surfac...
- qwertay 6y ago
  Says the proposal is abandoned in 2011. The thing is OSM does not deal with real time data, the general rule is if the data is likely to change within the next month it doesn't go in OSM. A lot of OSM apps and servers cache the OSM dataset so anything like a road closed for one day would be stale before it even reached users. Thats one of the big issues with OSM though, they have an attitude of "Thats not my problem, it should go in another dataset" but then no one actually has an alternative place to put it so users just miss out.
  - berkes 6y ago
    There are people working on layering the data better. I was at a talk about this at two State of the Map conferences. I don't have links or names ready, on mobile, sorry. The idea, in my words, is to have a standard on how to link between layers: how to merge them, so to say. That way, a routing app for a car would only need the roads and their features layers. But the search engine for tourists needs the poi layer and not all the road details. A 'live' layer for e.g. traffic density could then be a neat commercial product for OSM consumers. But without standards to link your layer to, say, the OSM streets, it is almost impossible to offer and process such a layer.
6y ago

dewitt 6y ago

"Road directionality" being only 98.9% accurate seems to be a huge problem for a navigation app!

throwaway2245 6y ago
Road directionality is variable over time. I'm not sure at what rate it changes but I bet it's a lot more than 1.1% per year.
- djrogers 6y ago
  Hmm, I’ve seen maybe a handful of two-way streets change to one-way over my entire life, and have never seen a one-way street change direction. If ~1% of streets changed direction every year, there’d be mass confusion and frustration.
  - jmkb 6y ago
    Mapping OSM in NYC, I've run into about a dozen one-way streets that have changed direction at some point, sometimes for just a block or two.
  - macintux 6y ago
    There’s apparently a trend of converting one-way streets to two-way; cities have realized that one-way streets are a little too efficient, they increase bandwidth but often cities want you to stop and shop. Indianapolis has been moving that direction, at least, but I don’t know how widespread it is.
  - throwaway2245 6y ago
    One major thoroughfare in London changed (if I remember right) from one-way in one direction, to one-way in the other direction, to two-way, in the space of a couple of years. People got used to it very quickly, to the extent that they would not remember the change ever happened. If you have a broad enough roads to have two-way streets everywhere, there's little motivation for it to change. [Edited to note: at the level of individual cities, OSM's directionality was often estimated to be 100% correct] But, with some narrower one-way streets, there becomes a clear motivation to tweak things to improve traffic flows (and also tweak the surrounding two-way streets).

CivBase 6y ago

I've been looking to replace Google Maps with OSM on my smartphone. OSM itself is great, but I've been having a harder time finding a good app to use it with. Is anyone familiar with a good option? I mostly use a maps app for location searches and real-time GPS navigation, but offline maps and location sharing are nice-to-have features. I've been using OsmAnd and it's okay. The interface is pretty good. It supports offline maps, but not location sharing. Map tiles are kind of slow to load compared to Google Maps, which is odd since the tiles have to be downloaded to local storage. The location search often includes redundant results and whatever database they use to store place data is sparse on details like pictures, hours, or reviews. I'll keep using it to stay de-platformed from Google as much as possible, but I'd be willing to pay a bit for something more responsive and polished.

ashtonbaker 6y ago
I think Gaia GPS has a free tier? The base map is OSM. I've seen changes that I've made in OSM pulled in within a couple of days. I've gotten a lot of use out of my subscription. I can't speak as much to the location searching capability.
- leokennis 6y ago
  Love Gaia GPS as well. Location search is hit and miss, but once you're on a trail, it's a flawless app.
npteljes 6y ago
I previously had good experience with Maps.me. OsmAnd is great with its myriad settings and such, but somehow is a huge battery drain on my phone. I use it just fine in the background though, because it still provides turn by turn navigation that way. I think OsmAnd doesn't use generated tiles, but rather generates the map on the fly, hence the slowness.
Nrbelex 6y ago
Check out mapy.cz [1] or an ad-free version from Windy [2]. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy&utm_source=mapy_mobilni_web&utm_medium=banner_responziv&utm_campaign=responziv_appinstall https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.windymaps https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.wind...

Cshelton 6y ago

Unfortunately, working in the Commercial Real Estate world, OSM is no where close when doing a forward geocode... around the block is not close enough. Only ones accurate enough are Google (won't use) and Mapbox.

olejorgenb 6y ago
I thought mapbox used openstreetmap data?
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Not exclusively. They probably dump OpenAddresses data (or something similar) into their geocoder. https://openaddresses.io/ https://openaddresses.io/
  - juliansimioni 6y ago
    Hi, founder of Geocode Earth (https://geocode.earth https://geocode.earth), another geocoding service that _does_ use OpenAddresses and only other open data sets. Mapbox purchases data from, I believe, TomTom, and other proprietary sources. That's why they have cheap(er) pricing if you want to get results without the legal ability to store them, and much more expensive pricing if you do want to store it. I'm sure negotiating that arrangement with the proprietary address data vendors was...fun.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      That seems like it could just be an up charge. (or a discount for the ephemeral results if you want to look at it that way)
    - Cshelton 6y ago
      Yup, we pay them quite a bit to be able to store it.
    - jillesvangurp 6y ago
      A friend of mine runs opencage, which is a geocoder based on open streetmaps and a few other data sets. They got a lot more business when Google raised their prices a while back. Anyway, go give them some love if you need a geocoder because they are an awesome small company with a great service. Their freemium layer is also pretty generous. Nominatim is the defactor open streetmaps geocoder but its weakness is that it relies on only that; so it is only as good as OSM is. Geocoding is a surprisingly hard problem to solve with and without open data. Picking apart text strings into unambiguous addresses is just super hard with all the conventions for this around the world. One area open streetmaps is still inconsistent is house numbers and postal codes. Getting solid open data for that is just hard in some places.

nix23 6y ago

A friend and i where once on a mission, making bike-tours in the swiss mountains every weekend, and map every forgotten water-fountain in villages we crossed, great fun!

dawnerd 6y ago

Now if only there was a sensible way to self-host OSM data. From what I've found you either have to build a dedicated server to continuously building the tiles (which takes a ton of storage and processing power) or pay for it at an insane monthly price. I wish OSM would directly make their tiles available to mirror. (Maybe they do, but I haven't found it yet)

npteljes 6y ago
I just looked it up and apparently, all tiles would take up 54 TB[0], and even just the important tiles are around 1TB. I now understand why just downloading them isn't an option. [0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_disk_usage https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_disk_usage
- walrus01 6y ago
  It specifically says: OSM does NOT pre-render every tile. Pre-rendering all tiles would use around 54 TB of storage that 54TB figure is only if you pre-render into raster every zoom level of every tile for the whole world. a more typical self hosted openstreetmap renders the tiles on demand as you scroll or move the map. Disk space usage is MUCH less, such that my test/development setup fits well on a virtual machine with 300GB of disk space on a 12TB hard drive that cost $145. By this measurement I believe it's using just under 4 dollars of disk space, 8 dollars if you count its duplicate where it gets backed up to.
  - npteljes 6y ago
    Maybe the tileset could be distributed via torrent, like how they distribute the main dataset.
    - walrus01 6y ago
      that would be a bad idea since the tiles are ever changing. the master copy of the data is in a vector format. the idea is you want to run the (free) software engine that turns the vector data into various zoom levels of raster tiles, on demand. the vector data is really quite small, an entire large-population US state with many complex cities is under a few hundred megabytes.

einpoklum 6y ago

Google Maps is funded by corporations who want to mine your data and sell you stuff, whether you need it or not. OpenStreetMaps is funded by... well, actually, it's complicated. There are lots of individual donations, but there is also money by Amazon, Facebook and Apple. And some other corporations. Regardless - consider making a donation: https://donate.openstreetmap.org/ https://donate.openstreetmap.org/ I would also entreat you to ask OSM to get off corporate funding. And of course, if you can, contribute map data about where you live.

sschueller 6y ago

Mapping should be something done by the government. They know the most (construction plans etc) and they need to do it anyway. The data should then be available to anyone who needs it.

Madzen__ 6y ago
Is that not common in other countries? In Norway we have Kartverket[1] which maps all properties, trails, ports and roads. [1] https://www.kartverket.no/en https://www.kartverket.no/en
lucb1e 6y ago
Dutch government does this partially. That's how OSM got some great address location and house outline data in the Netherlands :) OSM worldwide is a mix of open datasets and original data. We'd not be as complete if one of those two were missing.

qwerty456127 6y ago

I've just checked (some years have passes since the last time) and it seems improved a lot for Europe too. I personally am not really interested in geospatial precision, I mostly use public transport so I need all the bus/tram/etc stops placed and named accurately.

radicaldreamer 6y ago

What is the best-in-class iOS app using OpenStreetMap? For iPhone, MagicEarth looks extremely good (https://www.magicearth.com/ https://www.magicearth.com/), but I'm wondering if people have other recommendations...

Terretta 6y ago
Arguably, “Windy Maps” is up there: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-maps/id1201228182 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-maps/id1201228182 Same devs as the stunning https://www.windy.com/ https://www.windy.com/ weather site which also has an app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-com/id1161387262 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-com/id1161387262 If you're more about hiking, maybe “Gaia GPS Hiking, Offroad Maps”: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gaia-gps-hiking-offroad-maps/id1201979492 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gaia-gps-hiking-offroad-maps/i...
tppiotrowski 6y ago
I have been using maps.me for about 5 years. It is becoming more and more commercialized but it's fast and has a simple interface.
- blendergeek 6y ago
  Maps.me was recently purchased by a weird payments company and replaced with a generic reference MapBox OSM app. This might have been reverted later but it was big on HN a few weeks ago.
  - andrewshadura 6y ago
    It was reverted, but a fork started nevertheless, OMaps, currently in an early stages of development. https://github.com/omapsapp https://github.com/omapsapp Matrix chat: https://matrix.to/#/#omapsapp:matrix.org?via=matrix.org&via=gitter.im https://matrix.to/#/#omapsapp:matrix.org?via=matrix.org&via=...
blendergeek 6y ago
Have you tried OsmAnd? Their iOS offering has gotten fairly good recently. It does cost a small amount of money to get the full version. The free version is complete (it is only limited in how many regions you can download) and more than useful for trying it out.

tracerbulletx 6y ago

As Google has lost it's sheen of benevolence over the last decade public knowledge projects like this become ever more appealing. Wikipedia proves they can be wildly successful all without capital investment and the perverse incentives that follow.

HotVector 6y ago
I used to think Google was the "good guy" by providing so many resources for free, but I've realized how they've exploited their market dominance by essentially manipulating the masses with their ad service. We need to move away from conglomerates and start using software that doesn't sell your soul to the devil.
- blackboxlogic 6y ago
  I thought I was helping the world by fixing things on google maps. That will be a perpetual reminder for how naive I can be.
  - themeiguoren 6y ago
    You were helping google, but you were also helping everyone who used their maps from that day into the future. Your comment gives off the air of someone upset they helped the wrong party in a zero-sum game. IMO, this is clearly a positive sum one, and you shouldn’t despair at improving little corners of the world just because actors you don’t like will also benefit.
    - blackboxlogic 6y ago
      I DO see it as zero sum. OSM and Google maps compete for a limited supply of users. It's the "wrong" team because when Google gets users, they make money. When OSM gets users, the map gets better and people are freer from abuse and manipulation.
      - thinkingemote 6y ago

lindner 6y ago

One thing that someone might consider is working with Data Portability laws to allow for export of user contributed data to corporate map platforms. I'd like to add my Google Maps contributions to OSM I'm a Level 7 local guide there and was an active user of MapMaker back in the day..

jakecopp 6y ago
Which sort of contributions would you like to copy from Google Maps to OSM? If you personally surveyed these places you can go to OpenStreetMap.org, sign in and then you can add your changes - OSM may already have the info so a straight import wouldn't be possible. Make sure not to copy any of Google's details to OSM that you didn't personally survey as that would violate copyright. Please reach out to me if you'd like a hand with getting started mapping on OSM :)
- lindner 6y ago
  Wrong answer.. This effort does not scale. You want to make it such that facts added by anyone can be easily imported with a simple opt-in. GDPR data portability could be expanded to include defined formats for export so that import can be done in an automated fashion.
  - jakecopp 6y ago
    > Wrong answer.. That comment doesn't provide any value. > You want to make it such that facts added by anyone can be easily imported with a simple opt-in. OpenStreetMap is much larger than just me or one company. > GDPR data portability could be expanded to include defined formats for export so that import can be done in an automated fashion. Imports are not an easy problem - how do you deal with conflicts? How to verify which data is more accurate? Imports are supported, and there is a detailed process for them to make sure OpenStreetMap stays well maintained: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines
wraptile 6y ago
Google map reviews is the only thing keeping me from OSM based maps. I love to explore, take photos and review places. OsmAnd has some review functionality but it's very barebones unfortunately.

hutch120 6y ago

I think this adds to the case for Rousseau's Theory of human nature... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Not just in US.. Here in Spain too. It's really great. Especially niche things like walking tracks are super accurate whereas on Google Maps I'm walking in one big grey square :D

post_break 6y ago

Is this because Google has increased the api pricing and people have switched to OSM?

lucb1e 6y ago
If at all, then only as an indirect effect. I haven't really noticed an uptick in contributors since then. There has been more publicity and more people using it (and abusing the community-run openstreetmap.org tile servers for commercial purposes²). ² It's fine to use OSM for commercial purposes, but hosting the tiles costs bandwidth and computational power. Embedding the community servers in your taxi tracking product and refreshing the page and map background every second is just a dick move.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

at_a_remove 6y ago

I have been considering looking at OSM as "yet another data source" for my maps, but overall I run into the highly abstract issue of comparison: how do I know that two segments (one from say OSM, one from perhaps the county) reference the same stretch of street for comparison? Even the slightest nudge of a single coordinate point on the line would mean that they were not geometrically identical, so I would not know to compare their attributes. Names are almost laughably bad for this purpose, for having multiple forms ("N SECOND ST" vs "NORTH 2ND STREET") and for being terrifying vague (so many, many Main Streets). Worse yet, a given segment might be split at a point not an intersection (speed change occurs here, municipality change, directionality change, road type change, etc) so I cannot even rely on those. And it is entirely possible for different maps to include a driveway, splitting a street at that point, while another does not, leaving it continuous. Large-scale automated comparison of this kind of thing is challenging.

galimaufry 6y ago
> Names are almost laughably bad for this purpose, for having multiple forms ("N SECOND ST" vs "NORTH 2ND STREET") and for being terrifying vague (so many, many Main Streets). libpostal (open source, open data location parser) might help with this. Between using it to parse the name, and supplementing this with the city name (using reverse geocode with imprecise coordinates), you might be able to get something useful.
juliansimioni 6y ago
One of the under-appreciated advantages OSM has here is that they have a fairly well enforced convention of using fully expanded abbreviations in addresses and street names. It's _much_ easier for automated comparison to replace `street` with `st` than it is to guess which one of many possible expansions to replace `st` with (is it saint? street? sankt? strasse?). This isn't foolproof but much of the "authoritative" data out there has no such convention, making analysis much more dangerous.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  Oh, cramming the names into a common format is something I have under my belt, but there are additional wrinkles and, worse yet, local bizarreness (aka "historical convention"). The names are the least of it, really, even if they are ... odd.

jonathan_app 6y ago

OSM is usually quite good. My colleagues simulated nationwide travel using OSM roads: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337332041_Agent-based_modeling_to_simulate_road_travel_using_Big_Data_from_smartphone_GPS_An_application_to_the_continental_United_States https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337332041_Agent-bas...

WaitWaitWha 6y ago

OSM is lovely, except for the UI. It is way over complicated.

jakecopp 6y ago
Which UI do you mean? The project is much larger than the frontend at OpenStreetMap.org - I agree that could do with some work :)
aendruk 6y ago
The thing is it doesn’t really have a UI; it’s just a database that people can do what they want with. The interfaces that you see—even on the OSM website—are a myriad of separate projects.

sabujp 6y ago

this is an excellent design interview question

mch82 6y ago

What small, growing companies are in the general field of mapping? Are there companies that fund employees to work on Open Street Maps?

habi 6y ago
Not only small companies do, but big ones, too: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/

dylan604 6y ago

I don't know which mapping options Lyft/Uber/etc use, but in my neighborhood, Google Maps has given street names to the allies behind people's houses. You can tell the drivers that have a clue, and will realize they should not turn down an alley. Drivers that are less cognizant of how the world works, follow the instructions dutifully, and waste time trying to figure out why everyone is confused.

visarga 6y ago

Off topic - is there a way to get an index of all businesses in OSM (restaurants, hotels, shops, etc)? I need the data for training a NLP model.

jaimex2 6y ago
Yeah, http://overpass-turbo.eu/ http://overpass-turbo.eu/ use the wizard.

Brakenshire 6y ago

The problem I have with OpenStreetMap is the license, it seems you can use an OSM derived base map and then layer anything else on top without problems, but you cannot process the data or mix in proprietary data without releasing the algorithm or the final dataset. So any competitive advantage derived from processing the data has to be immediately made open. So you see a lot of use of OSM as a base map, but very little use as a mapping database for commercial applications. I see why they did this, to prevent companies taking their data to bootstrap a closed competitor, but the consequence is that the data is locked in and is getting much less use than you’d hope as a database.

RicoElectrico 6y ago
Can you elaborate where license would be a problem? Keep in mind this: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidelines https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidel... Which eases the issue a little bit. For instance, MS uses OSM buildings for Bing Maps. Or Apple uses OSM for road data in selected countries (Ukraine?)
- Brakenshire 6y ago
  I’ll give a contrived example, say you’re a property startup, and you want to produce a walkability rating for each house you sell. You might want to do a calculation on OSM for restaurants within 5 minutes walk, maybe a chef rating for whether there’s a greengrocer, fishmonger, delicatessen and butcher within walking distance, or you want to take into account a walk back from the train station and the opening times to see whether the shops are still open after someone comes back from their commute. This is the kind of thing which would be interesting for big cities with a lot of commuting by public transport. My understanding is if you did this with OSM data you’d either have to make the algorithm that did the calculation public, or the output dataset (locations as keys and the final ratings for each as values). OSM has exceptions for horizontal slicing (layer separate data on top of an OSM basemap), for vertical slicing (union OSM data with separate data) and for trivial manipulations, but it seems it doesn’t if you do this kind of non-trivial processing of OSM data. So that means that it’s almost impossible for a company to find an interesting way of processing the data which can give them an advantage over a direct competitor, and there’s no real incentive to do so. This is my reading of the terms from a few months back, hopefully I’m wrong about it. But I suspect this is why it’s rare to see the data being used like this.

technotarek 6y ago

Can anyone recommend an OSM based turn-by-turn, iOS app that is CarPlay compatible?

habi 6y ago
https://www.magicearth.com/support/using-carplay/ https://www.magicearth.com/support/using-carplay/

racuna 6y ago

I used it while backpacking across Europe back in 2019. Very useful when I was offline. But a lot of building numbers were missed. So I had to use Google Maps when I had Internet connection.

known 6y ago

Wish Google MAPS and OSM share data with each other;

lucb1e 6y ago
I wish that too! The OSM data license is similar to GPL in that it requires, when mixed, the resulting derived work to still be shared in an open license. Having Google's data to complement OSM's would be a huge benefit for researchers that can use geographical data for all sorts of purposes, users of course, everyone really. As someone who contributes to OpenStreetMap and avoids Google Maps (for privacy reasons, not map reasons), I have nothing but respect for how much data they gathered. I'm just sad they keep it locked up.

rainbowzootsuit 6y ago

I took my honeymoon trip to New Zealand almost a decade ago using a Garmin gps and a map I made myself from the OSM database flashed on an SD card. It worked great.

csharptwdec19 6y ago

When I worked in HFC/Fiber Design (and automation via code), we tried looking into OSM as a replacement for our workflows that used google earth and hack on top of hack (Google earth kept removing parts of the API that were useful for automation/semi-automation, at least I got to learn lots about P/Invoke I guess?) Back then, it unfortunately wasn't usable for us, but I kept the research bits aside just in case when I left the job in 2013. When I spoke with someone still at that company a few months ago, I learned that over the years OSM had evolved/matured enough that they were using it far more than google earth. I miss GIS/Mapping. It's great to see it is still a collaborative community. :)