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After seeing tons of videos detailing the tools Google uses for their maps and using Google Map Maker, the OSM tools are much better at empowering the mapper to

After seeing tons of videos detailing the tools Google uses for their maps and using Google Map Maker, the OSM tools are much better at empowering the mapper to create map data. OSM might not have the computer vision tools or the Street View imagery, but there's still plenty of work to do with the existing tools and data.

jonknee 14y ago
Google's map makers are full time experts. I haven't seen the videos you have, but it sounded from the article tht the tools are complicated but powerful. OSM needs to focus on easy to get contributions.
femto 14y ago
I'd anticipate that OSM will get machine vision in the future. Consider that that a typical phone/tablet now has a GPS, camera and decent computing resources. It's begging for a machine vision application, which records video and automatically extracts mapping information, ready for uploading to OSM. Begging to the point, where I think it's just a matter of time. As an aside, are there any efforts afoot to decentralise OSM? It seems well suited to a geographically distributed database, with each country/area looking after it's own map, and the whole being drawn together by a common markup language. Assembling a global map would be a matter of crawling a network of servers, rather than downloading from a single source.
- a3_nm 14y ago
  > It's begging for a machine vision application, which records video and... A simpler use case for computer vision I could think of with Openstreetmap would be to automatically extract roads and building shapes from satellite imagery (though I hope that the license to use Bing would extend to something like this). > As an aside, are there any efforts afoot to decentralise OSM? Well, even Wikipedia's not decentralized yet and has no obvious plans to, so...
  - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
    Automatic tracing of roads from Bing provided aerial photos, with code provided by MSFT, 18 months ago: http://youtu.be/LR0WV2dGIRc http://youtu.be/LR0WV2dGIRc http://magicshop.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx http://magicshop.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx
    - yellowbkpk 14y ago
      Speaking as someone that wrote some code that interfaces with the Magicshop API, it works nowhere near as good as described in the video. It's a simple color matching algorithm that gets easily fooled by trees and dry grass. The project is a great start, but has basically been abandoned.
      - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
        I think the more important point though, is that both the permission and imagery is there (and the imagery is very high quality) so there's various other projects that e.g. trace outlines of lakes from the imagery (again basic color matching) or identify tennis courts via computer vision etc.
- rmc 14y ago
  I don't think there are any plans to decentralize OSM. There is no reason to decentralize it, it would solve no problems, and would cause a whole pile of new problems. From technical to political (what's a country?)

jonknee 14y ago

Google's map makers are full time experts. I haven't seen the videos you have, but it sounded from the article tht the tools are complicated but powerful. OSM needs to focus on easy to get contributions.

femto 14y ago

I'd anticipate that OSM will get machine vision in the future. Consider that that a typical phone/tablet now has a GPS, camera and decent computing resources. It's begging for a machine vision application, which records video and automatically extracts mapping information, ready for uploading to OSM. Begging to the point, where I think it's just a matter of time. As an aside, are there any efforts afoot to decentralise OSM? It seems well suited to a geographically distributed database, with each country/area looking after it's own map, and the whole being drawn together by a common markup language. Assembling a global map would be a matter of crawling a network of servers, rather than downloading from a single source.

a3_nm 14y ago
> It's begging for a machine vision application, which records video and... A simpler use case for computer vision I could think of with Openstreetmap would be to automatically extract roads and building shapes from satellite imagery (though I hope that the license to use Bing would extend to something like this). > As an aside, are there any efforts afoot to decentralise OSM? Well, even Wikipedia's not decentralized yet and has no obvious plans to, so...
- ZeroGravitas 14y ago
  Automatic tracing of roads from Bing provided aerial photos, with code provided by MSFT, 18 months ago: http://youtu.be/LR0WV2dGIRc http://youtu.be/LR0WV2dGIRc http://magicshop.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx http://magicshop.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx
  - yellowbkpk 14y ago
    Speaking as someone that wrote some code that interfaces with the Magicshop API, it works nowhere near as good as described in the video. It's a simple color matching algorithm that gets easily fooled by trees and dry grass. The project is a great start, but has basically been abandoned.
    - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
      I think the more important point though, is that both the permission and imagery is there (and the imagery is very high quality) so there's various other projects that e.g. trace outlines of lakes from the imagery (again basic color matching) or identify tennis courts via computer vision etc.
rmc 14y ago
I don't think there are any plans to decentralize OSM. There is no reason to decentralize it, it would solve no problems, and would cause a whole pile of new problems. From technical to political (what's a country?)