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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

> Organic Maps is an Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, and cyclists based on top of crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data […]

Good to see the source data mentioned right at the top, where it should be.

> […] and curated with love by MAPS.ME founders.

What does that mean? Not the nonsensical 'with love' part (that sounds unpleasantly sticky), but the curation; what is being curated? Is the source map data being hand-picked or modified, or is this just an opaque term for 'we built an app that gives you OSM in a handy offline format with custom rendering'?

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Organic Maps is a fork of MAPS.ME, after MAPS.ME jumped the shark and pivoted to something involving cryptocurency.

I think that "curated" refers to maintenance/development of the open-source project.

By "curated ... by MAPS.ME fouders" they mean that the Organic Maps maintainers include founders of the original MAPS.ME project (e.e.g, biodrankik is Alexander Borsuk, a former co-foudner, CEO, CTO of MAPS.ME [1,2]), which suggests that they have the experience to continue updating the app.

[1]: https://github.com/biodranik [2]: https://alex.bio/

Should motorways be shown first at zoom level 3 or 4? Some countries will look cluttered with them at zoom 3, but they're useful for very long route planning.

Should railways be feint and almost invisible (like Google Maps) or dark (like the OpenStreetMap default theme)? In many countries, they're very useful even for pedestrian navigation, "turn right after the railway bridge" etc, but I assume in the USA they're considered clutter.

What points of interest should be shown first, major tourist attractions or landmarks, or large shops?

Should gardens be green (almost everyone), or do we just ignore them and leave them grey (Google Maps)?

There are a lot of decisions that go into designing a map, even using Open Street Map data.

It's a reasonable word for the many interpretive choices that go into translating data into a map. What to include, when to show it, etc.

I realize it's no small feat to take the firehose of data you get from OSM and turn it into something usable. Other apps like OsmAnd have several presets and lots of knobs you can tweak to (hopefully) display the map exactly as you want it, but most users are too lazy for that, so there is definitely a niche for an app using a single algorithm that fits most use cases...

...but "curated with love by MAPS.ME founders", with "OpenStreetMap data" right before it, definitely sounds like some kind of manual process is involved - because that's what a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curator does, and that's usually a real person, not an algorithm. So, if it's an algorithm, the text is misleading.

But it isn't "an algorithm", it's hundreds or thousands of decisions about how to interpret data.

For instance, https://cycle.travel uses different rules to interpret data in different countries, because between differences in mapping practices, differences in infrastructure and differences in laws, you need to do that to have a good experience.

> But it isn't "an algorithm", it's hundreds or thousands of decisions about how to interpret data.

Map style can be described as an algorithm, but it is a human made one so curation definitely is present.

Ok, then it's a complicated algorithm, "lovingly hand-tuned" to give optimal results despite of inconsistencies in the data. I'm beginning to understand what they mean - but "curated" still sounds off to me...

You're free to not use the app because you don't like the marketing.

I was previously a big fan of Maps.me but they recently introduced a "Wallet" feature which is just really wired for a Navigation app to offer. Just looking at the UI of this app it looks like an "OSS" version where all the extra features are tossed out.

Huge thanks to the authors of this.

Openstreetmaps provides a lot more data than you see in the OSM map. You choose which data, such as terrain and road types, the user sees and therefore you could call it curation.

> What does that mean?

Most likely it is a direct translation from Russian by a non-native English speaker. I guess "curated" should have been "developed" or some other similar word.

There's nothing wrong with the English word "curated". I think pp is being a little punctilious. The writer just means that they aren't giving you a random data dump, they've engaged in some activity analogous to e.g. the curator of a museum, to select which data is worth showing. Pp is asking "does this mean that they have made a specific decision about all the data that is shown?" when I think it means they've probably tweaked parameters to show information they find useful given various densities and contexts.

How good their curation is remains to be seen of course.

Yes that is what I thought. They have developed a style, icons, colour scheme etc for the app. To show you the data in a visually pleasing for that they think is good.

Unlikely, as there’s no Russian verb that directly corresponds to “curate”; the loanword курировать kurir|ovatʹ is (of course) etymologically related but refers to managing, mentoring, or otherwise overseeing people or organizations, not things, and the sense of using one’s judgment to choose and present a subset of a collection is instead usually expressed by a word (roughly) meaning “select, choose” that does not convey an implication of being in charge. Neither has much to do with the words for “code”, “program”, or “develop”.

(Source: native speaker.)

I’m somewhat surprised by the reaction here. Does “curating” a map really sound so wrong? One can curate libraries, museums, exhibitions, bibliographies, or other sorts of collections, so is sifting OSM data in order to get something presentable so different? I’d have said “lovingly curated” rather than “curated with love”, but that’s another matter.

I think it's rather about the amounts of data we're talking about. It's not practical to manually select OSM data for the world. An open source project of this size could maybe do it for a bigger city. But this is obviously not limited to a city.

So what does "curate" mean in that sentence?

OSM includes practically any mappable data collected for free, including even Wikipedia entries with a physical location. I assume curating means deciding the relevance of stuff like this and making into a map thats similar to google maps. Curate has also lost a lot of its meaning after ~5 years of ad spam. "This holiday, Lexus presents a curated grifting experience" (leaving in the autocorrect typo, sorry)

I don’t rightly know what it means. Probably what you’d guess it does: a big ol’ pile of good-enough heuristic filters and transformations tuned on a handful of key locations, with a pinch of manual modification.

I was only surprised at the claim that the sentence doesn’t make sense in English, I never intended to imply that the sense wasn’t bullshit. (After the sellout stunt the MAPS.ME creators pulled I generally don’t view their participation as an advantage.)

They are balking simply because "curated" is a word that's become trendy for years in the tech/startup world and they are tired of hearing it.

The standard osm app is already offline, although the ux could be improved

There is no standard osm app on iOS. Top hit is OsmAnd and it's not free.

OsmAnd has two versions on the Play Store. One free and one paid (OsmAnd+). On F-Droid OsmAnd+ is available for free.

Either way it's not a "standard OSM app", just a popular one.

i cosider it the reference implementation

Well, on iOS the app is free, but you can download a limited number of maps. Then it's either subscription or payment for individual regions. Maps.me or Google or Yandex maps have free downloads. Organic maps also claim not to track activity.

Yup... but it also helps to know that OSM is not a cheap surrogate for the above-mentioned commercial services, for hiking or cycling it's actually much better - at least as far as the map is concerned, the navigation features of the apps I tried until now are unfortunately a bit lacking.

It isn't though. The Carto rendering style shown on openstreetmap.org is as close as we get to having a reference implementation. Osmand, while a good product, is much further removed from the OSM community.

Without getting into how official a product OSMAnd can be considered, I think it’s worth pointing out that Carto has limitations that OSMAnd improves on. Due to OSMAnd’s configurable vector drawing, it is possible to make the map show road surfaces or whether roads are lit. These are features missing from official OSM.org, which of course serves as little more than a tech demo.

You're absolutely right, I was thinking of osmAnd, maybe I should have said biggest instead of standard, whatever thanks for your correction

I thought a highly functional version was Magic Earth.

There is a free version, but with the free version you can only download a limited number of "regions" (a "region" could be a small country or a subdivision of a larger country).

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