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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

> When it launched in the mid-2000s, most spatial information was owned by governments, and was difficult or impossible to access.

It bothers me that this sentence is used as if the facts behind it are a logical arrangement of consequences. The fact that people are prevented from accessing data that they funded, and by all rights own, is an absurdity.

I appreciate that OSM exists, but in a perfect world, it shouldn't have to.

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"Difficult to access" here may have meant going to your national/state mapping bureau (or however it's called) and physically buying a printed copy of the maps. It's not necessarily that they "prevented people from accessing data that they funded", or at least it was not around here, just that getting maps required physical movement which I guess these days qualifies as "difficult to access".

I (and several others) used to trace these maps (by hand, using OziExplorer) then offer them for download in Garmin/MapDekode format. OSM didn't even exist at the point.

The data to generate the maps is likely digital, and not being able to obtain a digital copy of the data would qualify as inaccessible.

It was possible to obtain a digital copy, but you needed special equipment.

Most government data was only available on 9-track tapes. So few media outlets had the necessary equipment that reporters' groups would publish step-by-step information about how to get it done, and with what hardware.

On the consumer level? Forget about it.

Cartography predates computers, many maps were kept as the majority of technical documents are kept: in a physical archive.

Yes, but digital maps are old enough that my elementary school had a networked GIS package to show us maps in the computer lab in the early 90s, and it's much older than that.

That hasn't always been true. USGS topo maps, for example, were originally drawn and plotted on paper and had to be digitized. At one point, I think they had a way to request a digital scan, but there was a processing fee.

Now almost all of that data available online for free from their website, and they have ways to access it in bulk and via API.

I think the bigger problem nowadays is accessing GIS data from different cities and local governments. Many states and cities put the data online, but each one organizes it differently, possibly in different formats, with different methods for accessing it.

Some of that government data existed in the form of physical maps, and the data was difficult to access because it had never been digitized, even government-internally. No one was prevented from digitizing it themselves, and in fact a lot of early OSM data came from enthusiasts digitizing old US Army maps because, indeed, they were public domain.

Then you have cases like the Ordnance Survey in the UK where apparently a lot of the data is neither freely available to the general public, nor paid for by the general public.

> a lot of early OSM data came from enthusiasts digitizing old US Army maps because, indeed, they were public domain

But that's the rub, we the taxpayers have paid for all the map creation, even the new high resolution ones with far greater accuracy, yet we're stuck with these older, lower resolution and likely out-of-date maps. Even the new maps should be public domain.

?? Some countries don’t have the resources for high precision maps. They have old maps from whenever they were commissioned.

If you're referring to maps produced by the US government, they are in the public domain. Early on it sounds like there wasn't an easy way to transfer "raw" map data around (hence the tracing), but it's pretty easy now to access official maps in full resolution:

* US Geological Survey: https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/ngp/tnm-delivery

* National Park Service: https://mapservices.nps.gov/arcgis/rest/services

* US Forest Service: https://www.fs.usda.gov/visit/maps (the API access is further down that page).

Those linked above typically available through a standard API (Tile Map Service), as well as ESRI's moderately well documented REST API for accessing shapefiles and features. My one complaint about this data is how the USFS manages their data. In that case it seems each service region defines how data should be made available, so you have a pile of different methods for accessing things like road/trail features, or points of interest (in many cases, it comes down to "fetch this pile of ZIP files").

The OS are making a lot more data freely available as part of the Geospatial commission push to make geospatial data more widely available to drive innovation. I wouldn't be surprised if this is all a slow response to external activities like OSM and Google

I remember reading that when all OS data cost money half of their income came from other government departments, so once you add dealing with all that licensing there's not much extra cost to just fund it out of general revenue.

It’s also in response to the urban planning difficulty of knowing who owns what or what’s under this spot.

In the Netherlands we have access to, and are permitted to use and derive from, government map sources such as the cadastral maps and the various municipal data layers (trees, benches, natural features such as waterways, streets).

This is great, and we can go the extra mile on OpenStreetMap because of it, but these sources are not a replacement for OpenStreetMap; the goals are different and the data presented on it is different. On OSM points-of-interest are important. Things like shops, attractions, schools, museums, etc. Government maps don't have these. Municipal maps may have streets drawn in as areas accurate to the centimetre, but that is not the same as the graph of routable ways that OSM has (not just for cars, but for bicycles and pedestrians as well).

OpenStreetMap mappers can make great use of government sources where permitted, but a good digital map is much more.

The AND data was imported into OSM in 2007, it's safe to say the Netherlands has always had alot of available data.

> in a perfect world, it shouldn't have to.

Well not exactly. E.g. in the Netherlands we have open building and address data. It took the community, with many volunteers, like a year to import that into OpenStreetMap.

Compiling open data into a comprehensive map without duplicate data or rough edges is a lot of work. I agree that all governments can make this a huge lot easier by just publishing what they already made with public funding, but that doesn't mean OSM would suddenly cease to have a right to exist. It would just be able to improve its quality even further.

In a perfect world, rather, commercial maps shouldn't have to exist.

I agree with your point, although I wouldn't go so far as to say OSM shouldn't have to exist. There is still a lot of value in a global, collaborative mapping project that can be updated by anyone, on the ground, within seconds of a change. Official government maps can take much longer to show new buildings, road changes, etc.

Conflation is a huge accessibility concern and it’s not possible to mandate cross-government without some unified international government body. Even within the US, spatial data conflation is a major technical and political problem at the federal level, since the data is mostly collected at the state and municipal level, then rolled up into a Frankenstein dataset. The truly global nature of OSM is unique and the geographic diversity of coverage is unrivaled even among commercial sources, much less governmental.

> The fact that people are prevented from accessing data that they funded, and by all rights own, is an absurdity.

Is this also true for software? https://publiccode.eu

I don't know about other countries but here in Sweden we have Lantmäteriet ("The land measurement agency") and they have an interactive map based on their data that is free to use. https://minkarta.lantmateriet.se/

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