4 ms·

OpenStreetMap does not work in my city and I live in a very large US metropolis.

rmc 15y ago
Hi there. How do you mean "does not work"? OSM is a map. Do you mean your area is not well mapped? That happens some times. You can always improve the area and data yourself.
- potatolicious 15y ago
  This seems rather disingenuous. A map that is missing major areas is not only not well mapped, it clearly "does not work". This sounds to me like the age-old argument us techies make to laymen. Use open source! If there are problems you can fix them yourself! Except these people are not programmers, nor do they have any interest in being one. I'm not a cartographer, I have no interest in being one. I certainly am not signing up to integrate OSM into what I'm building and be on the hook for user complaints about missing map data, and have to do that myself. Not to mention, contributing to OSM in the strictly legal way is not at all trivial - for legal reasons you simply cannot consult any other map, so basically you'd have to go out, walk/drive/bike around your area with paper and pen in hand and "map" it yourself. That or trust you have perfect memory w.r.t. your city. The bar for contributing back is high, can we blame people when they'd rather just have a map that worked?
  - yellowbkpk 15y ago
    > This seems rather disingenuous. A map that is missing major areas is not only not well mapped, it clearly "does not work". It is very rare for OSM to be completely bare in a major metropolitan area (especially in the US). It could be that the addresses are gone, but at the very least the road network will be there from the TIGER import. > I'm not a cartographer, I have no interest in being one. I certainly am not signing up to integrate OSM into what I'm building and be on the hook for user complaints about missing map data, and have to do that myself. You don't have to be a cartographer to add data to OSM. You sign up, point and click or drag and drop. It takes minutes and you don't have to have any particular knowledge before hand (especially cartography). Having said that, I completely understand not wanting to be on the hook for user complaints. That's why Google charges thousands of dollars. Some people (the writer of the blog post in particular) aren't interested in paying that. > Not to mention, contributing to OSM in the strictly legal way is not at all trivial - for legal reasons you simply cannot consult any other map, so basically you'd have to go out, walk/drive/bike around your area with paper and pen in hand and "map" it yourself. That or trust you have perfect memory w.r.t. your city. The bar for contributing back is high, can we blame people when they'd rather just have a map that worked? This is not true. Mapping with paper and pencil on foot or bike or car is a great way to get outdoors and thousands of people use this technique to add to OSM every day, but you can also use any one of the dozens of aerial imagery backgrounds available to help you create data from memory.
    - potatolicious 15y ago
      > "It is very rare for OSM to be completely bare in a major metropolitan area" I don't think anyone claims OSM is simply missing entire cities - but entire developments in cities are definitely missing in many cases. > "You don't have to be a cartographer to add data to OSM. You sign up, point and click or drag and drop." Not true. OSM gives you a handy satellite image reference, so you can certainly fill in streets - but unless you're from the area, you are poorly qualified to decide what type of street it is, and you certainly don't know the street names. In other words, the common contributor is empowered with little more ability than to trace satellite imagery, with no knowledge of place names, street names, or landmarks that are necessary to build a real map. In fact, the only places that the average contributor is qualified to map is the area directly around themselves. This may work for a casual contributor who wants to see their neighborhood on OSM, but it's entirely unrealistic for a developer who wants to support his/her users. Consult another map? That violates the terms for contributing to OSM - for good reason, they want to steer absolutely clear of any allegations of plagiarism or copyright infringement. So if someone complains that my app has missing map data, unless the user is located near me or one of the areas I'm intimately familiar with, they're SOL until someone else fixes it. > "Mapping with paper and pencil on foot or bike or car is a great way to get outdoors and thousands of people use this technique to add to OSM every day" This makes no sense at all. I get the spirit of the project, and I fully support it. In fact, I have contributed to OSM. But expecting this out of most developers, or even a significant portion, is lunacy. This is like telling your IT manager "we should use this very incomplete library. The code is open, so any missing functionality or bugs we can fix ourselves! This will be a great benefit to our coders, so they can crack their knuckles on some problems they don't usually get to work on." Which is entirely true, but misses the point by a mile - developers may be interested in contributing to OSM (I know I am), but how many are willing to ship this in a production environment, where the goal is to build a great product, not baby-sit an incomplete data provider?
      - yellowbkpk 15y ago
        > This is like telling your IT manager "we should use this very incomplete library. The code is open, so any missing functionality or bugs we can fix ourselves! This will be a great benefit to our coders, so they can crack their knuckles on some problems they don't usually get to work on." There are plenty of organizations that do this. Google spends thousands of developer hours and millions of dollars contributing to open source projects. And it's not just for the developers: they recognize a better resource and use it. When their needs outgrow the library's capabilities they add to it. There are at least a few companies doing this exact same thing for OSM data, too. For example, MapQuest and Bing both use OSM data in some of their products and contribute data and tools/source back to OSM. > ...developers may be interested in contributing to OSM (I know I am), but how many are willing to ship this in a production environment, where the goal is to build a great product, not baby-sit an incomplete data provider? As I've previously mentioned, OSM is certainly inadequate in many places (and the community is working really hard to fix that -- thanks for contributing!), but in some places it's _MUCH_ better than Google. It's certainly a business decision: do you want to pay Google $10k+/month (where it was $0/month not 2 months ago) to run your site or do you want to use OSM? If your business's primary area of interest is Europe (especially Germany), then you probably want to use OSM. If you want to cover the entire world or don't want to deal with the lack-luster-but-improving data in the US, then use Google.
  - richardw 15y ago
    I live in South Africa and I haven't found a place (yet) that isn't perfectly mapped. I checked various far-flung African countries for a customer who was looking to move from Google Maps and they all seemed fine. So, the map does 'work' for me, just not in the U.S. This chicken and egg isn't going to spring out fully formed, so either U.S. mappers get out there, or this situation will continue. Obviously developers won't start driving around in cars to map things out, but I wonder why the map-oriented communities haven't supported OSM? And surely map-oriented developers could start an initiative to highlight less-well mapped areas? Now if only I could use Twilio and Google Payments here. We can't even buy music from iTunes, despite everyone having iPods and iPhones for almost as long as they've been around, and Apple stores in most major malls.
  - rmc 15y ago
    I'm not trying to do the common "patches welcome" snark, but I'm trying to help. The poster might have some actual problem (eg "osm can't do directions") that I might know the answer to ("cloudmade do directions based on osm data"). Although osm contributing can be a lot of work, its very easy for lots of people to add some data, esp. about where they live or grow up. Is there a coffers shop, school, or path near where you grewbup that's not on the map? Every little contribution helps. People are often proud to see their home correctly represented on the internet. Many of your complaints are mostly valid if there is a totally accurate alternative map available, but its not the clear cut. In many places osm is of better quality than Google maps, and considerably cheaper than the national mapping/ordnance survey agencies. There is no perfect solution.

rmc 15y ago

Hi there. How do you mean "does not work"? OSM is a map. Do you mean your area is not well mapped? That happens some times. You can always improve the area and data yourself.

potatolicious 15y ago
This seems rather disingenuous. A map that is missing major areas is not only not well mapped, it clearly "does not work". This sounds to me like the age-old argument us techies make to laymen. Use open source! If there are problems you can fix them yourself! Except these people are not programmers, nor do they have any interest in being one. I'm not a cartographer, I have no interest in being one. I certainly am not signing up to integrate OSM into what I'm building and be on the hook for user complaints about missing map data, and have to do that myself. Not to mention, contributing to OSM in the strictly legal way is not at all trivial - for legal reasons you simply cannot consult any other map, so basically you'd have to go out, walk/drive/bike around your area with paper and pen in hand and "map" it yourself. That or trust you have perfect memory w.r.t. your city. The bar for contributing back is high, can we blame people when they'd rather just have a map that worked?
- yellowbkpk 15y ago
  > This seems rather disingenuous. A map that is missing major areas is not only not well mapped, it clearly "does not work". It is very rare for OSM to be completely bare in a major metropolitan area (especially in the US). It could be that the addresses are gone, but at the very least the road network will be there from the TIGER import. > I'm not a cartographer, I have no interest in being one. I certainly am not signing up to integrate OSM into what I'm building and be on the hook for user complaints about missing map data, and have to do that myself. You don't have to be a cartographer to add data to OSM. You sign up, point and click or drag and drop. It takes minutes and you don't have to have any particular knowledge before hand (especially cartography). Having said that, I completely understand not wanting to be on the hook for user complaints. That's why Google charges thousands of dollars. Some people (the writer of the blog post in particular) aren't interested in paying that. > Not to mention, contributing to OSM in the strictly legal way is not at all trivial - for legal reasons you simply cannot consult any other map, so basically you'd have to go out, walk/drive/bike around your area with paper and pen in hand and "map" it yourself. That or trust you have perfect memory w.r.t. your city. The bar for contributing back is high, can we blame people when they'd rather just have a map that worked? This is not true. Mapping with paper and pencil on foot or bike or car is a great way to get outdoors and thousands of people use this technique to add to OSM every day, but you can also use any one of the dozens of aerial imagery backgrounds available to help you create data from memory.
  - potatolicious 15y ago
    > "It is very rare for OSM to be completely bare in a major metropolitan area" I don't think anyone claims OSM is simply missing entire cities - but entire developments in cities are definitely missing in many cases. > "You don't have to be a cartographer to add data to OSM. You sign up, point and click or drag and drop." Not true. OSM gives you a handy satellite image reference, so you can certainly fill in streets - but unless you're from the area, you are poorly qualified to decide what type of street it is, and you certainly don't know the street names. In other words, the common contributor is empowered with little more ability than to trace satellite imagery, with no knowledge of place names, street names, or landmarks that are necessary to build a real map. In fact, the only places that the average contributor is qualified to map is the area directly around themselves. This may work for a casual contributor who wants to see their neighborhood on OSM, but it's entirely unrealistic for a developer who wants to support his/her users. Consult another map? That violates the terms for contributing to OSM - for good reason, they want to steer absolutely clear of any allegations of plagiarism or copyright infringement. So if someone complains that my app has missing map data, unless the user is located near me or one of the areas I'm intimately familiar with, they're SOL until someone else fixes it. > "Mapping with paper and pencil on foot or bike or car is a great way to get outdoors and thousands of people use this technique to add to OSM every day" This makes no sense at all. I get the spirit of the project, and I fully support it. In fact, I have contributed to OSM. But expecting this out of most developers, or even a significant portion, is lunacy. This is like telling your IT manager "we should use this very incomplete library. The code is open, so any missing functionality or bugs we can fix ourselves! This will be a great benefit to our coders, so they can crack their knuckles on some problems they don't usually get to work on." Which is entirely true, but misses the point by a mile - developers may be interested in contributing to OSM (I know I am), but how many are willing to ship this in a production environment, where the goal is to build a great product, not baby-sit an incomplete data provider?
    - yellowbkpk 15y ago
      > This is like telling your IT manager "we should use this very incomplete library. The code is open, so any missing functionality or bugs we can fix ourselves! This will be a great benefit to our coders, so they can crack their knuckles on some problems they don't usually get to work on." There are plenty of organizations that do this. Google spends thousands of developer hours and millions of dollars contributing to open source projects. And it's not just for the developers: they recognize a better resource and use it. When their needs outgrow the library's capabilities they add to it. There are at least a few companies doing this exact same thing for OSM data, too. For example, MapQuest and Bing both use OSM data in some of their products and contribute data and tools/source back to OSM. > ...developers may be interested in contributing to OSM (I know I am), but how many are willing to ship this in a production environment, where the goal is to build a great product, not baby-sit an incomplete data provider? As I've previously mentioned, OSM is certainly inadequate in many places (and the community is working really hard to fix that -- thanks for contributing!), but in some places it's _MUCH_ better than Google. It's certainly a business decision: do you want to pay Google $10k+/month (where it was $0/month not 2 months ago) to run your site or do you want to use OSM? If your business's primary area of interest is Europe (especially Germany), then you probably want to use OSM. If you want to cover the entire world or don't want to deal with the lack-luster-but-improving data in the US, then use Google.
- richardw 15y ago
  I live in South Africa and I haven't found a place (yet) that isn't perfectly mapped. I checked various far-flung African countries for a customer who was looking to move from Google Maps and they all seemed fine. So, the map does 'work' for me, just not in the U.S. This chicken and egg isn't going to spring out fully formed, so either U.S. mappers get out there, or this situation will continue. Obviously developers won't start driving around in cars to map things out, but I wonder why the map-oriented communities haven't supported OSM? And surely map-oriented developers could start an initiative to highlight less-well mapped areas? Now if only I could use Twilio and Google Payments here. We can't even buy music from iTunes, despite everyone having iPods and iPhones for almost as long as they've been around, and Apple stores in most major malls.
- rmc 15y ago
  I'm not trying to do the common "patches welcome" snark, but I'm trying to help. The poster might have some actual problem (eg "osm can't do directions") that I might know the answer to ("cloudmade do directions based on osm data"). Although osm contributing can be a lot of work, its very easy for lots of people to add some data, esp. about where they live or grow up. Is there a coffers shop, school, or path near where you grewbup that's not on the map? Every little contribution helps. People are often proud to see their home correctly represented on the internet. Many of your complaints are mostly valid if there is a totally accurate alternative map available, but its not the clear cut. In many places osm is of better quality than Google maps, and considerably cheaper than the national mapping/ordnance survey agencies. There is no perfect solution.