Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtw | Hacker News Reader

I like the constant updates and community behind OpenStreetMap. I'm thinking, would there be a particular reason why a developer would choose Google Maps instead of OpenStreetMap for a new application? I don't know if there are any major flaws

View on HN

The main reasons that someone would still choose Google, as I (a long-term OSM developer) see it:

- Address search. OSM has lousy address coverage.

- One single provider, works out of the box. OSM is much more flexible in the long run, but you can't just plug in an "OpenStreetMap API" and expect it to do everything for you. (That said, Mapbox is going a long way towards providing this.)

- Satellite imagery. (Again, you can get this from a reseller like Mapbox.)

- StreetView.

- Public transport directions.

- Familiarity.

https://www.mapillary.com/ is working on a crowd sourced Creative Commons licensed street view data source.

Looks really cool. I am doing a project that relies heavily on Google Street View photos, and having an open dataset would be amazing. Is there any guarantee that Mapillary will always offer the user-contributed photos to the public for free download? And if they disappear, that all the photos will still be available?

How could OSM's address coverage be improved?

Go to http://www.openstreetmap.org/, find your street, click 'Edit', login or create an account, and make sure your local area is correctly classified. You can mark an area as a building and give it tags to say what the address and street number is.

I don't think Google mapped every street single address to a set of lat/long?? There must be mathematical formula to map a street address, knowing how the city allocated street numbers

Oh dear. Maybe in some places, which has a sensible and consistant addressing format. But there are plenty of places where there is no rhyme or reason to it.

Have a look at Germany in OSM. That's what crowdsourced maps can do.

They pull in public data. OpenAddresses is doing that and gives a sense of just how much is available:

http://openaddresses.io/

You also see Google talking about extracting building numbers from Streetview photos.

Actually they do. This is why what you enter in CAPTCHAs appears to be house numbers - it is from Google Streetview.

Same way any aspect of OSM is improved! By editing the map! Get out there and find some addresses and add them to OSM>

Here's some examples:

* Telnav Scout: a typical GPS/navigation app. I guess figure using OpenStreetMaps is better than their proprietary data, and they don't want to be competing with Google and depending on Google for data at the same time.

* Humanitarian Organizations (HOT): it turns out that you can get volunteers to trace maps from satellite imagery for remote places that have no other maps.

* Backcountry/mountaineering: a lot of places in the mountains are poorly mapped in Google Maps. OSM is a lot easier to edit, and supports a lot more features when it comes to describing terrain and whatnot.

Only one I know of is data availability in an area you need, or possibly better routing support (I haven't done anything with that in OSM before).

Check out http://project-osrm.org/ for routing.

Disclosure: I work for Mapbox, we offer a directions service based on OSRM, I'm paid to work on it daily.

As well as OSRM, there's also GraphHopper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com