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I'm just gonna point out something: OSM is 10 years old, and after countless hrs and investing its finally ready for prime time. People who think a new internet

I'm just gonna point out something: OSM is 10 years old, and after countless hrs and investing its finally ready for prime time. People who think a new internet is coming via some disruptive technology need to read this article and realize that real, long-term, awesome change takes time.

Vik1ng 12y ago
I would argue that really depends on the subject. Maps are to some extent limited. Yes, they are never 100% up-to-date, but looking at my small village if I had mapped that 10 years ago all I would have had to change up until today would be maybe 15 new homes and 2 new streets a few stores and some small adjustments, but that's pretty much it. On the other hand if I wanted to build a search engine that's a completely different story.
awongh 12y ago
yes, and part of the reason this took so long could be that google maps was free/ very cheap for a lot of that 10 years. Once they got more expensive people had more incentive to switch....
pekk 12y ago
It's still not really usable for navigation, has all kinds of accuracy problems and the worst is that they don't even want help scaling up the data pipeline, they just want armies of people to click by hand on their weak editing app. Labor is expensive, technology is cheap, why insist on such an insanely labor-intensive data pipeline?
- MaBu 12y ago
  Things are changing in a way. There is Slide from Strava ( http://labs.strava.com/ http://labs.strava.com/ ). Where you just roughly click where a path is and it creates nice path from its database of gazillion GPX tracks. It can be used as an iD editor plugin already. There are scripts for automatic lake and building creation from satellite images but most interesting thing seems to be coming from Digital Globe. In this year state of the map USA ( http://stateofthemap.us/session/mapping-the-world-in-raster/ http://stateofthemap.us/session/mapping-the-world-in-raster/ ) they said that this year SDK is coming where they would automatically draw buildings and streets from satellite images and you would get APIs to play with this and insert into OSM. (They already provide images to OSM through Bing and MapBox). So yes drawing streets and buildings isn't fun but you need people to know what is a street/cycleway POI and etc.. There are also projects for figuring out one way streets, max speeds.

Vik1ng 12y ago

I would argue that really depends on the subject. Maps are to some extent limited. Yes, they are never 100% up-to-date, but looking at my small village if I had mapped that 10 years ago all I would have had to change up until today would be maybe 15 new homes and 2 new streets a few stores and some small adjustments, but that's pretty much it. On the other hand if I wanted to build a search engine that's a completely different story.

awongh 12y ago

yes, and part of the reason this took so long could be that google maps was free/ very cheap for a lot of that 10 years. Once they got more expensive people had more incentive to switch....

pekk 12y ago

It's still not really usable for navigation, has all kinds of accuracy problems and the worst is that they don't even want help scaling up the data pipeline, they just want armies of people to click by hand on their weak editing app. Labor is expensive, technology is cheap, why insist on such an insanely labor-intensive data pipeline?

MaBu 12y ago
Things are changing in a way. There is Slide from Strava ( http://labs.strava.com/ http://labs.strava.com/ ). Where you just roughly click where a path is and it creates nice path from its database of gazillion GPX tracks. It can be used as an iD editor plugin already. There are scripts for automatic lake and building creation from satellite images but most interesting thing seems to be coming from Digital Globe. In this year state of the map USA ( http://stateofthemap.us/session/mapping-the-world-in-raster/ http://stateofthemap.us/session/mapping-the-world-in-raster/ ) they said that this year SDK is coming where they would automatically draw buildings and streets from satellite images and you would get APIs to play with this and insert into OSM. (They already provide images to OSM through Bing and MapBox). So yes drawing streets and buildings isn't fun but you need people to know what is a street/cycleway POI and etc.. There are also projects for figuring out one way streets, max speeds.