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Just finished the article. Did I miss where the author answers the question what Overture Map means for the future of OSM, or it it rather meant to be an overvi

by lucb1e 4y ago

Just finished the article. Did I miss where the author answers the question what Overture Map means for the future of OSM, or it it rather meant to be an overview of the state of things for those not involved in OSM?

hsuduebc2 4y ago
Same here. He did not. This is probably meant for someone who know about their internal affairs.
- clnq 4y ago
  It means nothing except that there will be more contributors and/because OSM data will make it into more projects. OSM might also feel more pressure to standardize things like tags for features, which would resolve a considerable problem in using OSM data. Both tag names and value formats vary from region to region, and that's probably why almost any proprietary maps software is more useful than OSM apps. Having personally had to use OSM data, writing heuristics to parse tag names and values is a lot of work. As for criticism of Overture on OSM community forums, there seems to be a lot of vague gesturing at "big tech bad, OSM community good." A more constructive place to look for what Overture means for OSM is the OSM Foundation's blog/press statement - https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2022/12/22/views-from-the-openstreetmap-foundation-on-the-launch-of-overture/ https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2022/12/22/views-from-the-ope.... Which, to my mind, reads as saying that OSM data is free to use for corporations, but OSM hopes that Overture improvements flow upstream. If my tone seems a bit negative, it's because I'm a bit tired of the negative reaction open source communities tend to have when being challenged or offered a collaboration opportunity with big tech. I feel like the approach Blender takes with big tech (like NVIDIA) is much, much more productive.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    Both tag names and value formats vary from region to region, and that's probably why almost any proprietary maps software is much more useful than OSM apps. That's a pretty bold statement. There is certainly lots of variation in usage, but commonly used tags are used pretty consistently, the variation is largely in things that "almost any proprietary maps software" doesn't even bother with.
    - clnq 4y ago
      I don't think this is a bold statement at all. I agree with you about "pretty consistently", but that is not consistent enough for many uses. Let's say I want my maps application to know whether a building is commercial or residential. Some buildings have building=residential, others have building=yes or building=oui, and others just have landuse=commercial (or landuse=residential, suburban, quarter, suburb, neighbourhood, or residential=yes, or residential=apartments). This is not the worst-case scenario; we can write an interpreting adapter for these tags. But somewhere in the world, there will be edge-case tags the adapter won't handle. And it is challenging to use that approach for applications that tens of thousands of users will see and scrutinize.
      - Hasnep 4y ago
        Zooming in on my hometown the buildings that I expect to be commercial are tagged as commercial, but on Google maps the same buildings are pretty inconsistently coloured. Are there other commercial maps that do a good job at that?
        clnq 4y ago
        I don't know off the top of my head. But missing tags or mistagging is a slightly different problem than tags that are difficult to parse. What's un/mistagged can be corrected in a crowd-sourced way (as Google Maps is doing). What's challenging to parse continues to be so no matter how much crowd-sourcing is present. The solution is straightforward for OSM - standardize the tags. It's been a long debate in OSM, but I hope the commercial influence will make them do it. There are practically no downsides and significant benefits.
      - rmc 4y ago
        > Some buildings have ... have building=yes or building=oui There are 435,057,783 building=yes, and 1 building=oui. The OSM community has standardized. https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=yes https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=yes https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=oui https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=oui
  - jaakl 4y ago
    Free (and messy from data user perspective) tagging of OSM is not a bug but feature: the system is optimized for map creator. Maybe it is the main thing why OSM was (and is) success compared to many other crowdmapping attempts. Sure map users now need to do cleaning and quality control, but this is always application-specific and cannot be forced to the mappers. I feel OSM balance between structure and freedom is good enough. Now some map applications are quite standard: eg nice base map and navigation, so for these quite many companies have built own data cleaning/structuring/rendering stacks, where only some pieces are easily available as OS, rest is kept as business secrets. I hope Overture will provide usable OS full stack here. Certainly this will be also specific to the contributors own interests, and it does not try to “fix” OSM into well structured database.
mch82 4y ago
The article didn’t answer this, but hinted at a few possibilities (I’ll be checking out the Overture Map project to see if it’s possible to confirm any of these: more corporate friendly governance, different data model, additional standards for map features. One way to gauge the impact might be to keep any eye on what Meta does with its Daylight Map Distribution project (a clean OSM), https://daylightmap.org/ https://daylightmap.org/.
- mch82 4y ago
  From the Overture FAQ… > “Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.“
  - jonas-w 4y ago
    Reading this sound very promising, but i can't stop thinking "Where is the catch?". I would love to trust this project and believe in the good, but looking at the companies that are overture members doesn't help at all.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
      The catch as I can see it is with the complexity and issues of combining OSM with a bunch of other data sources. This is what Apple used to do before shipping their own maps. Most of us remember some of the highly publicized issues that were associated with that. I also noticed that Apple, who is (was?) also a heavy OSM consumer, is conspicuously missing from this list.
      - astrange 4y ago
        Apple uses OSM in some countries (mainly “global south” like Africa). OSM maps are superior to the new maps in some places like Australia, although maybe in irrelevant ways - there’s not really value in having every single building drawn on the map.

by lucb1e 4y ago

hsuduebc2 4y ago

Same here. He did not. This is probably meant for someone who know about their internal affairs.

clnq 4y ago
It means nothing except that there will be more contributors and/because OSM data will make it into more projects. OSM might also feel more pressure to standardize things like tags for features, which would resolve a considerable problem in using OSM data. Both tag names and value formats vary from region to region, and that's probably why almost any proprietary maps software is more useful than OSM apps. Having personally had to use OSM data, writing heuristics to parse tag names and values is a lot of work. As for criticism of Overture on OSM community forums, there seems to be a lot of vague gesturing at "big tech bad, OSM community good." A more constructive place to look for what Overture means for OSM is the OSM Foundation's blog/press statement - https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2022/12/22/views-from-the-openstreetmap-foundation-on-the-launch-of-overture/ https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2022/12/22/views-from-the-ope.... Which, to my mind, reads as saying that OSM data is free to use for corporations, but OSM hopes that Overture improvements flow upstream. If my tone seems a bit negative, it's because I'm a bit tired of the negative reaction open source communities tend to have when being challenged or offered a collaboration opportunity with big tech. I feel like the approach Blender takes with big tech (like NVIDIA) is much, much more productive.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Both tag names and value formats vary from region to region, and that's probably why almost any proprietary maps software is much more useful than OSM apps. That's a pretty bold statement. There is certainly lots of variation in usage, but commonly used tags are used pretty consistently, the variation is largely in things that "almost any proprietary maps software" doesn't even bother with.
  - clnq 4y ago
    I don't think this is a bold statement at all. I agree with you about "pretty consistently", but that is not consistent enough for many uses. Let's say I want my maps application to know whether a building is commercial or residential. Some buildings have building=residential, others have building=yes or building=oui, and others just have landuse=commercial (or landuse=residential, suburban, quarter, suburb, neighbourhood, or residential=yes, or residential=apartments). This is not the worst-case scenario; we can write an interpreting adapter for these tags. But somewhere in the world, there will be edge-case tags the adapter won't handle. And it is challenging to use that approach for applications that tens of thousands of users will see and scrutinize.
    - Hasnep 4y ago
      Zooming in on my hometown the buildings that I expect to be commercial are tagged as commercial, but on Google maps the same buildings are pretty inconsistently coloured. Are there other commercial maps that do a good job at that?
      - clnq 4y ago
        I don't know off the top of my head. But missing tags or mistagging is a slightly different problem than tags that are difficult to parse. What's un/mistagged can be corrected in a crowd-sourced way (as Google Maps is doing). What's challenging to parse continues to be so no matter how much crowd-sourcing is present. The solution is straightforward for OSM - standardize the tags. It's been a long debate in OSM, but I hope the commercial influence will make them do it. There are practically no downsides and significant benefits.
    - rmc 4y ago
      > Some buildings have ... have building=yes or building=oui There are 435,057,783 building=yes, and 1 building=oui. The OSM community has standardized. https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=yes https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=yes https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=oui https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=oui
- jaakl 4y ago
  Free (and messy from data user perspective) tagging of OSM is not a bug but feature: the system is optimized for map creator. Maybe it is the main thing why OSM was (and is) success compared to many other crowdmapping attempts. Sure map users now need to do cleaning and quality control, but this is always application-specific and cannot be forced to the mappers. I feel OSM balance between structure and freedom is good enough. Now some map applications are quite standard: eg nice base map and navigation, so for these quite many companies have built own data cleaning/structuring/rendering stacks, where only some pieces are easily available as OS, rest is kept as business secrets. I hope Overture will provide usable OS full stack here. Certainly this will be also specific to the contributors own interests, and it does not try to “fix” OSM into well structured database.

mch82 4y ago

The article didn’t answer this, but hinted at a few possibilities (I’ll be checking out the Overture Map project to see if it’s possible to confirm any of these: more corporate friendly governance, different data model, additional standards for map features. One way to gauge the impact might be to keep any eye on what Meta does with its Daylight Map Distribution project (a clean OSM), https://daylightmap.org/ https://daylightmap.org/.

mch82 4y ago
From the Overture FAQ… > “Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.“
- jonas-w 4y ago
  Reading this sound very promising, but i can't stop thinking "Where is the catch?". I would love to trust this project and believe in the good, but looking at the companies that are overture members doesn't help at all.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    The catch as I can see it is with the complexity and issues of combining OSM with a bunch of other data sources. This is what Apple used to do before shipping their own maps. Most of us remember some of the highly publicized issues that were associated with that. I also noticed that Apple, who is (was?) also a heavy OSM consumer, is conspicuously missing from this list.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Apple uses OSM in some countries (mainly “global south” like Africa). OSM maps are superior to the new maps in some places like Australia, although maybe in irrelevant ways - there’s not really value in having every single building drawn on the map.