Hacker News Reader

Comment by emacsen | Hacker News Reader

This was a hard post to make. OSM was a big part of my life for many years, and I have friends in the project. I like my friends (even the ones I disagree with).

But where OSM has failed most in my view (and maybe I need to add this to the article) is that there are now free geographic datasets from local governments and without the ability to integrate them into OSM easily, and then update them (which we basically can't do), I fear OSM is going to ultimately fail at its mission

View on HN

Where do you have experience with OSM data anyway? Because your view of the project differs from mine as day differs from night. The quality in western Europe is equal to or better than commercial maps. And the one time I looked at a random, small village in the Sahara, OSM was also better: https://twitter.com/lucb1e/status/522491538912604160

Is OSM not doing this? I swear I've seen them importing and updating street level address data in my city - it directly referenced some city GIS server. Maybe not officially, but someone must be running scripts that do this?

Somebody might be doing that for their area but for example I haven't seen that happen in Estonia where the government provides absolutely excellent data but there's no easy and meaningful way getting that data into OSM

Seems more like a few hour long hacking session than some serious systemic problem to me.

I would stress the "meaningful" part. I assume that every country in EU gives out CC0 (or so) licensed data for at least geocoding that have the same EU-wide high-level hierarchical format. Problem is that this hierarchy does not map well to OSM tags (which is one instance of problems caused by using tags instead of layers) and often also does not map well to local users' expectations (ie. converting the object names to/from handwritten address is non-trivial problem). Also sometimes the government provided data tends to be stale.

Stale or not, this seems like a ridiculously complicated problem without some set of rules/boundaries to govern it. I.e. You're doing a diff with spatial data that not only differs in the spatial component, but in the semantic/descriptive domain as well.

> I assume that every country in EU gives out CC0 (or so) licensed data for at least geocoding that have the same EU-wide high-level hierarchical format.

Far from the case, I'm afraid.

But it did happen. A few years ago we (as in estonian + russian communitites) helped import building outlines and most roads to OSM: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/imports/2013-March...

I went ahead and added a small section on this.

Is this a technology issue? Or a funding issue?

Seems more like a political issue

It's frequently a licensing issue and then also a resources issue.

There's relatively generalized tools for diffing data against OSM and outputting a change file, but lots of data is released using ambiguous or slightly incompatible licensing.

One example is http://blog.improve-osm.org/en/2018/01/new-features-and-enha...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com