9 ms·

OpenStreetMap is in trouble – a critical take on Bing Map Builder

280 points by pietervdvn 4y ago

uneekname 4y ago
Microsoft has historically been a fairly good ally to the OpenStreetMap community. We use Bing imagery a lot in our mapping efforts, as well as their buildings dataset, just to name two examples. I hope that Microsoft owns up to this mistake, and pivots back to supporting our community rather than fracturing it. As the article notes, the OSM community is very sensitive about how large corporations communicate with us as they contribute.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  yeah but in a strange twist, the Meta Overture project appears to have hired this guy as a major architect (corrections welcome) https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/
- pietervdvn 4y ago
  That's what I'm hoping as well. I specifically wrote this essay with the hope that this will be corrected. And I don't think that big, corporate involvement is necessarily evil - but we should hold them to a higher standard and be critical of them in due time.
Waterluvian 4y ago
I studied geography for about eight years in university and something that drove me kinda mad is how cartographic authoring tools were more like CAD software than they were like video games (I once had a short rant over dinner with the President of ESRI Canada about how my GPU is built for rendering geometries and ArcGIS ignores its existence). On the surface, the CAD pedigree makes sense. But… why aren’t more tools like video games? Make it super easy for anyone to start getting involved. I remember all the gatekeeping-like discussion in “Public Participation GIS” seminars: you’ve gotta be an expert to author good data because there’s so many ways to do it wrong. Blah. No. One of my daydreams if I get FU money is to make an incredibly user friendly set of web based analytical GIS tools. Not just the basics like buffering and queries, but the entire spatial toolbox to build data processing pipelines. I want a layperson to be able to ask “where should I buy a house if I care about these four parameters?” (and for it to not be a hidden magic purpose built portal on some realtor website) The immediate retort from my internal pessimist is “the data isn’t available or isn’t consistent“ but I don’t buy that anymore. I remember having to go ask nicely to obtain shapefiles from my city. Decades later it’s all just online. And the community can help catalog data sources, add metadata about transforming them to standard schemas, and sharing data pipelines with the community in some sort of catalog. I really think it’s a UX problem above all else.
- dark-star 4y ago
  The StreetComplete app for Android is a bit like a game and helps update "trivial" tagging tasks on OSM. I used it a bit while cycling around my hometown. Simply stop, see what you can tag/update, and continue cycling. There should be more of these simple apps like that
  - Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
    Every Door is really good too (it's Flutter, so iOS/Android). I polished off a shopping centre near here in record time with it.
    - raybb 4y ago
      Links to mentioned apps: https://every-door.app/ https://every-door.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/
- joelfooxj 4y ago
  RE: Canadian GIS data. I thought it was really cool that most Canadian cities offer LIDAR scans for download by the public
- agumonkey 4y ago
  gamification of things is discussed, but it's still not discussed enough (one could even argue that we could reach back to pedagogics ala piaget). that said there's one aspect about gamification is that it often stops working when information requires deep thinking but it might still be fixable i'd love to make everything game like, society as a whole would benefit from it (it could even save energy)
  - pietervdvn 4y ago
    The reason that I haven't pursued a gamification approach with https://mapcomplete.osm.be https://mapcomplete.osm.be is twofold: - I'm focusing on other usability issues (and features) first - I'm worried that "mapping for points" instead of "mapping to have a good map/help the community/map what the contributor needs" will result in lower data quality. Before implementing such a thing, this should be thoroughly studied
jmkb 4y ago
Just to be clear: this is an individual user's "diary" (blog) hosted at openstreetmap.org, not in any way an official statement from the OpenStreetMap Foundation. And I agree with the author that the design of Bing Map Builder looks problematic. The biggest problem being that it's segregating its contributors from the general OSM population in the name of "privacy."
- pietervdvn 4y ago
  Indeed - this is my opinion, not the opinion of "OpenStreetMap". Thanks for pointing this out!
mistrial9 4y ago
authors work site: https://mapcomplete.osm.be/?language=en https://mapcomplete.osm.be/?language=en
- sccxy 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - lallysingh 4y ago
    What are you talking about? The page says: "Welcome to MapComplete MapComplete is an OpenStreetMap-viewer and editor, which shows you information about features of a specific theme and allows to update it."
  - pietervdvn 4y ago
    Hi there! Author here! I take pride in crediting OSM, so it is on multiple places. There even is an entire explanation on why OSM rocks under the 'copyright' tab. It's gonna move soon to be a standalone button. Furthermore, a panel showing the community index is in the works.
    - sccxy 4y ago
      OSM does not like that you hide copyright away to some button. It must be VERY visible all the time. It is not the case always when you show OSM data. I have got very angry letters from OSM enthusiasts about that "hidden copyright".
      - detaro 4y ago
        All I can find on their website meets the OSM attribution guidelines, so please be specific where you think they "fail to properly credit openstreetmap" if you throw such accusations around.
      - sccxy 4y ago
        https://i.imgur.com/kLfv65T.png https://i.imgur.com/kLfv65T.png OSM data, but no visible credit.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bjourne 4y ago
Unfortunately, OSM takes clear political stances and does not use internationally recognized borders when they should. That is antithetical to freedom (as in free software) and is why I would never donate to the project.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  could you be more specific ? If the Openstreetmap is a description of things that are visible, like built roads, buildings and named places.. How are disputed borders stopping the useful building of a map? Doesn't the United Nations and many Federal governments, have conventions for showing and discussing borders in dispute? Why would disputed borders in some places, stop the (obviously) global project from continuing to map the real, physical place of Earth ?
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  Such as?
  - mtmail 4y ago
    Not OP but I can give an example. Kosovo is recognized by 101 of 193 UN members. Something can be international recognized and still whatever option you show on a map you potentially anger half the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_Kosovo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_K... . Somaliland isn't recognized by UN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somaliland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somaliland There's 4 possible maps of Western Sahara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Western_Sahara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Western_Sa... Crimea is either Russian or Ukranian on some maps, for a while both in OSM
- redfast00 4y ago
  There is a policy about this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputed_territories https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputed_territories
  - 4y ago
jojobas 4y ago
OSM should ban this sort of impersonation/layering crap, and implement detection and banning of such accounts.
- sp8962 4y ago
  Impersonation is explicitly banned https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use If it applies to the situation at hand is naturally questionable.
janosd 4y ago
Microsoft is in a difficult position here. Just taking the GDPR, they are presumably the data controller and they are passing on potentially personally identifiable information to OSM without a data processing agreement. They are vulnerable to a right to be forgotten request, which they can then not fulfill. Given Bing's global reach, I'm sure this is not the only issue. I'd be really careful trying to attribute this issue to malice on Microsoft's part.
- Misdicorl 4y ago
  Not really. Microsoft has inserted their own identity system into an OSM application they built. There's no problem if there's a login modal to use your OSM identity to make edits. They can even have a "let Microsoft manage my OSM account" checkbox with the relevant legalese if they want that to be slick.
  - janosdebugs 4y ago
    But there's the problem: if you don't have an OSM account, the user needs to go sign up for one. If Microsoft creates the account for them, that's not just legalese, they might still be seen as the data controller. Or, at least it may be problematic enough to give the in-house lawyers a headache.
    - Misdicorl 4y ago
      But that's not a problem at all! That's exactly the desired/required operation. OSM wants a very clear demarcation: this may be a Microsoft application, but you are an OSM community member (if you want to contribute). That's perfectly encapsulated by a signup/login barrier. Any slick-ness on top of that fundamental requirement is sugar
- maxerickson 4y ago
  It'd be better not to build the weird limited account on top of OSM and not capture the edits. It's not a difficult position at all.
chrismorgan 4y ago
When you open https://www.bing.com/mapbuilder/ https://www.bing.com/mapbuilder/ for the first time, this text is at the bottom of its splash modal: > Map builder is powered by data from OpenStreetMap—a free, community-driven map of the world. By continuing, you agree to the Microsoft Services Agreement. Edits you make will be visible on maps that use OpenStreetMap data. … but it’s presented at a font size of 7px. For many people and on many devices, 7px text might as well not even be there. And #767676-on-#ffffff makes it a little worse. (Actually, the second last word, “OpenStreetMap”, is a link-styled button that opens the help/info panel described in the article, and due to careless styling and very weird DOM structures, that word “OpenStreetMap” is then bumped to 12px while that panel is open.) I’m honestly not certain I’ve ever encountered such-sized text before, for any purpose, let alone important stuff like this. I probably have, given how 9px was hardly rare fifteen years ago (HN the yes-we-all-know-its-font-sizes-are-way-too-small-and-why-hasn’t-sanity-been-restored-just-yet-so-we-can-all-stop-using-it-at-at-least-120%-zoom even has 7pt, which is 9⅓px), but nothing springs to mind for even 8px.
phyzome 4y ago
Well, it seems like the first step would be straightforward: Block these Microsoft accounts from editing. You can't have people contributing without accepting the license agreement. I would normally say the next step after that is to talk to someone at Microsoft. But it's very, very difficult not to infer malice or at least unwillingness to engage, here: Microsoft previously used a single account for all of these edits: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/5701 https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/5701 That account was blocked, with well-described reasons. Now they're using per-user accounts, and haven't fixed the issues that were raised. That is not very encouraging.
piebro 4y ago
Maybe to give some more context to the use of "Map builder" as editing Software in OSM, we can look at some statistics from osm changeset. (Disclaimer: I created the statistics and website) Looking at the usage, there was 1 contributor in 2021 (Map Builder User [1]), 1506 contributors in 2022 and 890 contributors in January 2023. In total, 2376 contributors used Map builder. As of January 2023, it's the 24th most used tool by total contributor count. [2] Looking at the edit count: Map builder is the 98th most used editing software with 3768 edits in 2021, 69618 in 2022, 38954 in January 2023 and a total of 112340 edits. [3] It has gained in popularity in the last year. I hope these statistics can help with the discussion. [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Map%20builder%20user https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Map%20builder%20user [2] https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#c229 https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#c229 [3] https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#eb30 https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#eb30

280 points by pietervdvn 4y ago

Microsoft has historically been a fairly good ally to the OpenStreetMap community. We use Bing imagery a lot in our mapping efforts, as well as their buildings dataset, just to name two examples. I hope that Microsoft owns up to this mistake, and pivots back to supporting our community rather than fracturing it. As the article notes, the OSM community is very sensitive about how large corporations communicate with us as they contribute.

mistrial9 4y ago
yeah but in a strange twist, the Meta Overture project appears to have hired this guy as a major architect (corrections welcome) https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/
pietervdvn 4y ago
That's what I'm hoping as well. I specifically wrote this essay with the hope that this will be corrected. And I don't think that big, corporate involvement is necessarily evil - but we should hold them to a higher standard and be critical of them in due time.

Waterluvian 4y ago

I studied geography for about eight years in university and something that drove me kinda mad is how cartographic authoring tools were more like CAD software than they were like video games (I once had a short rant over dinner with the President of ESRI Canada about how my GPU is built for rendering geometries and ArcGIS ignores its existence). On the surface, the CAD pedigree makes sense. But… why aren’t more tools like video games? Make it super easy for anyone to start getting involved. I remember all the gatekeeping-like discussion in “Public Participation GIS” seminars: you’ve gotta be an expert to author good data because there’s so many ways to do it wrong. Blah. No. One of my daydreams if I get FU money is to make an incredibly user friendly set of web based analytical GIS tools. Not just the basics like buffering and queries, but the entire spatial toolbox to build data processing pipelines. I want a layperson to be able to ask “where should I buy a house if I care about these four parameters?” (and for it to not be a hidden magic purpose built portal on some realtor website) The immediate retort from my internal pessimist is “the data isn’t available or isn’t consistent“ but I don’t buy that anymore. I remember having to go ask nicely to obtain shapefiles from my city. Decades later it’s all just online. And the community can help catalog data sources, add metadata about transforming them to standard schemas, and sharing data pipelines with the community in some sort of catalog. I really think it’s a UX problem above all else.

dark-star 4y ago
The StreetComplete app for Android is a bit like a game and helps update "trivial" tagging tasks on OSM. I used it a bit while cycling around my hometown. Simply stop, see what you can tag/update, and continue cycling. There should be more of these simple apps like that
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
  Every Door is really good too (it's Flutter, so iOS/Android). I polished off a shopping centre near here in record time with it.
  - raybb 4y ago
    Links to mentioned apps: https://every-door.app/ https://every-door.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/
joelfooxj 4y ago
RE: Canadian GIS data. I thought it was really cool that most Canadian cities offer LIDAR scans for download by the public
agumonkey 4y ago
gamification of things is discussed, but it's still not discussed enough (one could even argue that we could reach back to pedagogics ala piaget). that said there's one aspect about gamification is that it often stops working when information requires deep thinking but it might still be fixable i'd love to make everything game like, society as a whole would benefit from it (it could even save energy)
- pietervdvn 4y ago
  The reason that I haven't pursued a gamification approach with https://mapcomplete.osm.be https://mapcomplete.osm.be is twofold: - I'm focusing on other usability issues (and features) first - I'm worried that "mapping for points" instead of "mapping to have a good map/help the community/map what the contributor needs" will result in lower data quality. Before implementing such a thing, this should be thoroughly studied

jmkb 4y ago

Just to be clear: this is an individual user's "diary" (blog) hosted at openstreetmap.org, not in any way an official statement from the OpenStreetMap Foundation. And I agree with the author that the design of Bing Map Builder looks problematic. The biggest problem being that it's segregating its contributors from the general OSM population in the name of "privacy."

pietervdvn 4y ago
Indeed - this is my opinion, not the opinion of "OpenStreetMap". Thanks for pointing this out!

mistrial9 4y ago

authors work site: https://mapcomplete.osm.be/?language=en https://mapcomplete.osm.be/?language=en

sccxy 4y ago
[flagged]
- lallysingh 4y ago
  What are you talking about? The page says: "Welcome to MapComplete MapComplete is an OpenStreetMap-viewer and editor, which shows you information about features of a specific theme and allows to update it."
- pietervdvn 4y ago
  Hi there! Author here! I take pride in crediting OSM, so it is on multiple places. There even is an entire explanation on why OSM rocks under the 'copyright' tab. It's gonna move soon to be a standalone button. Furthermore, a panel showing the community index is in the works.
  - sccxy 4y ago
    OSM does not like that you hide copyright away to some button. It must be VERY visible all the time. It is not the case always when you show OSM data. I have got very angry letters from OSM enthusiasts about that "hidden copyright".
    - detaro 4y ago
      All I can find on their website meets the OSM attribution guidelines, so please be specific where you think they "fail to properly credit openstreetmap" if you throw such accusations around.
    - sccxy 4y ago
      https://i.imgur.com/kLfv65T.png https://i.imgur.com/kLfv65T.png OSM data, but no visible credit.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bjourne 4y ago

Unfortunately, OSM takes clear political stances and does not use internationally recognized borders when they should. That is antithetical to freedom (as in free software) and is why I would never donate to the project.

mistrial9 4y ago
could you be more specific ? If the Openstreetmap is a description of things that are visible, like built roads, buildings and named places.. How are disputed borders stopping the useful building of a map? Doesn't the United Nations and many Federal governments, have conventions for showing and discussing borders in dispute? Why would disputed borders in some places, stop the (obviously) global project from continuing to map the real, physical place of Earth ?
RobotToaster 4y ago
Such as?
- mtmail 4y ago
  Not OP but I can give an example. Kosovo is recognized by 101 of 193 UN members. Something can be international recognized and still whatever option you show on a map you potentially anger half the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_Kosovo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_K... . Somaliland isn't recognized by UN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somaliland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somaliland There's 4 possible maps of Western Sahara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Western_Sahara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Western_Sa... Crimea is either Russian or Ukranian on some maps, for a while both in OSM
redfast00 4y ago
There is a policy about this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputed_territories https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputed_territories
- 4y ago

jojobas 4y ago

OSM should ban this sort of impersonation/layering crap, and implement detection and banning of such accounts.

sp8962 4y ago
Impersonation is explicitly banned https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use If it applies to the situation at hand is naturally questionable.

janosd 4y ago

Microsoft is in a difficult position here. Just taking the GDPR, they are presumably the data controller and they are passing on potentially personally identifiable information to OSM without a data processing agreement. They are vulnerable to a right to be forgotten request, which they can then not fulfill. Given Bing's global reach, I'm sure this is not the only issue. I'd be really careful trying to attribute this issue to malice on Microsoft's part.

Misdicorl 4y ago
Not really. Microsoft has inserted their own identity system into an OSM application they built. There's no problem if there's a login modal to use your OSM identity to make edits. They can even have a "let Microsoft manage my OSM account" checkbox with the relevant legalese if they want that to be slick.
- janosdebugs 4y ago
  But there's the problem: if you don't have an OSM account, the user needs to go sign up for one. If Microsoft creates the account for them, that's not just legalese, they might still be seen as the data controller. Or, at least it may be problematic enough to give the in-house lawyers a headache.
  - Misdicorl 4y ago
    But that's not a problem at all! That's exactly the desired/required operation. OSM wants a very clear demarcation: this may be a Microsoft application, but you are an OSM community member (if you want to contribute). That's perfectly encapsulated by a signup/login barrier. Any slick-ness on top of that fundamental requirement is sugar
maxerickson 4y ago
It'd be better not to build the weird limited account on top of OSM and not capture the edits. It's not a difficult position at all.

chrismorgan 4y ago

When you open https://www.bing.com/mapbuilder/ https://www.bing.com/mapbuilder/ for the first time, this text is at the bottom of its splash modal: > Map builder is powered by data from OpenStreetMap—a free, community-driven map of the world. By continuing, you agree to the Microsoft Services Agreement. Edits you make will be visible on maps that use OpenStreetMap data. … but it’s presented at a font size of 7px. For many people and on many devices, 7px text might as well not even be there. And #767676-on-#ffffff makes it a little worse. (Actually, the second last word, “OpenStreetMap”, is a link-styled button that opens the help/info panel described in the article, and due to careless styling and very weird DOM structures, that word “OpenStreetMap” is then bumped to 12px while that panel is open.) I’m honestly not certain I’ve ever encountered such-sized text before, for any purpose, let alone important stuff like this. I probably have, given how 9px was hardly rare fifteen years ago (HN the yes-we-all-know-its-font-sizes-are-way-too-small-and-why-hasn’t-sanity-been-restored-just-yet-so-we-can-all-stop-using-it-at-at-least-120%-zoom even has 7pt, which is 9⅓px), but nothing springs to mind for even 8px.

phyzome 4y ago

Well, it seems like the first step would be straightforward: Block these Microsoft accounts from editing. You can't have people contributing without accepting the license agreement. I would normally say the next step after that is to talk to someone at Microsoft. But it's very, very difficult not to infer malice or at least unwillingness to engage, here: Microsoft previously used a single account for all of these edits: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/5701 https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/5701 That account was blocked, with well-described reasons. Now they're using per-user accounts, and haven't fixed the issues that were raised. That is not very encouraging.

piebro 4y ago

Maybe to give some more context to the use of "Map builder" as editing Software in OSM, we can look at some statistics from osm changeset. (Disclaimer: I created the statistics and website) Looking at the usage, there was 1 contributor in 2021 (Map Builder User [1]), 1506 contributors in 2022 and 890 contributors in January 2023. In total, 2376 contributors used Map builder. As of January 2023, it's the 24th most used tool by total contributor count. [2] Looking at the edit count: Map builder is the 98th most used editing software with 3768 edits in 2021, 69618 in 2022, 38954 in January 2023 and a total of 112340 edits. [3] It has gained in popularity in the last year. I hope these statistics can help with the discussion. [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Map%20builder%20user https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Map%20builder%20user [2] https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#c229 https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#c229 [3] https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#eb30 https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#eb30