3 ms·

At this point, I don't really consider OSM an OSS project, but an infrastructure. It has small value for everyone, but all combined usage, it has immense econo

by phh 5y ago

At this point, I don't really consider OSM an OSS project, but an infrastructure. It has small value for everyone, but all combined usage, it has immense economical value for the society. All alone, it's not really useful to end-users, but it can help a lot of businesses that couldn't exist before it. Maps are already considered infrastructure, since they are already made by governments! The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it.

Proven 5y ago
matkoniecz 5y ago
> The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it. The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets, and many such datasets are already in use and being used to improve OSM (and often problems are reported back, resulting in fixes in official datasets!). Government official editing directly would be in many cases more harmful than useful.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets Second best way to contribute is to force commercial corporations to share the datasets they have of what is essentially public data - what is in the physical world and where. Currently, I see a lot of this kind of data on Google Maps, but not on OSM (e.g. location of various cultural and commercial venues, public transportation lines and schedules etc.) And by "force" I mean something like legislation or regulation.
- phh 5y ago
  I understand why you say this (which sums up to "governments are bureaucrats, please get out of the way for us to do the actual job"), but the issue is that there are still people needed to go from government data to OSM. Ideally, governments would simply pay OSM people to do it on their own, but eh, we know this can never happen, and even if it did, greedy people might be tempted by that kind of money and would go into the OSM community just for that.
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    Once data is high quality actual import is quite easy to do. Vast majority of time is used up on handling useful but not fully correct data. I am not aware of any datasets that are high quality, on a compatible license, including data of interest to OSM and existing for longer than a year - that would not be imported already. There are more people interested in making imports than high quality datasets on a compatible licenses, this is not the bottleneck.
    - gnufx 5y ago
      For clarity, I assume "import" isn't meant to mean everything in the dataset is shortly in OSM, but it's available to aid with mapping (e.g. free UK Ordnance Survey data).
      - matkoniecz 5y ago
        At least in OSM context there are several types of use of external data - import (adding object to database) - for example https://budynki.openstreetmap.org.pl/ https://budynki.openstreetmap.org.pl/ is used by OSM community in Poland to import official address and building data after review (sadly, quality makes necessary to review data but still saves time overall) - using for mapping (for example Bing aerial, Strava heatmap, aerial imagery released by many governments is also available on a compatible license) - linking (for example many OSM objects link Wikipedia articles about them or their official website) - used to find places for mapping (if Google starts showing new road I am not allowed to copy it into OSM - both due to licensing and low quality of Google data. But I can select this place for the next bicycle trip and map everything there as I survey this area) Not sure how it matches general terminology, OSM has some slang/terms which is sometime incompatible or unknown elsewhere.
skadge 5y ago
Some governments already do, and sometimes at a massive scale. See for instance the mass import of French cadastre in OSM in 2008. We are talking about millions of georeferenced entities.

by phh 5y ago

Proven 5y ago

matkoniecz 5y ago

> The only missing part to say OSM is an infrastructure, is for governments to actually contribute to it. The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets, and many such datasets are already in use and being used to improve OSM (and often problems are reported back, resulting in fixes in official datasets!). Government official editing directly would be in many cases more harmful than useful.

einpoklum 5y ago
> The best way to contribute is to openly license government datasets Second best way to contribute is to force commercial corporations to share the datasets they have of what is essentially public data - what is in the physical world and where. Currently, I see a lot of this kind of data on Google Maps, but not on OSM (e.g. location of various cultural and commercial venues, public transportation lines and schedules etc.) And by "force" I mean something like legislation or regulation.
phh 5y ago
I understand why you say this (which sums up to "governments are bureaucrats, please get out of the way for us to do the actual job"), but the issue is that there are still people needed to go from government data to OSM. Ideally, governments would simply pay OSM people to do it on their own, but eh, we know this can never happen, and even if it did, greedy people might be tempted by that kind of money and would go into the OSM community just for that.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  Once data is high quality actual import is quite easy to do. Vast majority of time is used up on handling useful but not fully correct data. I am not aware of any datasets that are high quality, on a compatible license, including data of interest to OSM and existing for longer than a year - that would not be imported already. There are more people interested in making imports than high quality datasets on a compatible licenses, this is not the bottleneck.
  - gnufx 5y ago
    For clarity, I assume "import" isn't meant to mean everything in the dataset is shortly in OSM, but it's available to aid with mapping (e.g. free UK Ordnance Survey data).
    - matkoniecz 5y ago
      At least in OSM context there are several types of use of external data - import (adding object to database) - for example https://budynki.openstreetmap.org.pl/ https://budynki.openstreetmap.org.pl/ is used by OSM community in Poland to import official address and building data after review (sadly, quality makes necessary to review data but still saves time overall) - using for mapping (for example Bing aerial, Strava heatmap, aerial imagery released by many governments is also available on a compatible license) - linking (for example many OSM objects link Wikipedia articles about them or their official website) - used to find places for mapping (if Google starts showing new road I am not allowed to copy it into OSM - both due to licensing and low quality of Google data. But I can select this place for the next bicycle trip and map everything there as I survey this area) Not sure how it matches general terminology, OSM has some slang/terms which is sometime incompatible or unknown elsewhere.

skadge 5y ago

Some governments already do, and sometimes at a massive scale. See for instance the mass import of French cadastre in OSM in 2008. We are talking about millions of georeferenced entities.