Open Maps for Europe: access official map, geospatial and land information | Hacker News Reader

Open Maps for Europe: access official map, geospatial and land information

mapsforeurope.org

116 pointsbryanrasmussen38 comments

There is a rather weird overlap with the OpenStreetMap project they’re not mentioning.

which is far superior regarding the roads

comically true.

then again, a goverment project basing on osm is about as trustworthy as a dissertation citing wikipedia.

and i guess there is value in having different mapping projects as long as there is no real consensus (taiwan, crimea ...)

I think that’s a little unfair to OSM. While of course it varies in quality, in the last few years I’m finding OSM is far more trustworthy than our offices native Ordinance Survey maps in the UK. The latter feel like they were drawn up by someone who just couldn’t be arsed to do a proper job or had two dots and drew a line between them.

At one point I got stuck down a dead end in a field with one angry horned motherfucker in it where OS said I had right of way. This resulted in me having to climb over a fence rapidly and take a chunk out of my leg.

Of course OSM was accurate and it turned out OS was completely wrong by about 200m.

I am now a regular OSM contributor. I rarely find anything inaccurate or missing. I’m mostly adding detail.

It's also little unfair to Wikipedia. In practice, it's more reliable than anything except primary sources, and it provides context to the latter.

also to parent; unfairness was intended.

thou the point was not to bring up the question of quality, but authority and highlight that users and institutions have different priorities.

whatever that means

However, in a similar manner, OSM suffers from vandalism, data recency issues, and missing data around areas that don't have a lot of interest where the more official source doesn't suffer.

I've been working on a map based project and we've found issues with vandal like edits to the road network breaking sensible routing, and poorer address data in areas like Northern Ireland when compared with our more official Ordnance Survey (in contrast with the above poster)

I disagree. I love seeing OSM being used in public projects. The fact that it's crowd-sourced does not mean that the government does not contribute to the data set. For instance, Poland's Fire Service uses OSM-based solutions and I heard from people working on those solutions that they actually constantly monitor the changes in OSM to catch possible errors that could have an impact on fire fighting operations.

Bulgaria is a black hole on this map although the regional Cadastre and Cardography agency does have the necessary data.

A prime example of a public institution leeching money for providing access to data that has been gathered entirely with public funds.

For reference they sell access to raster visualisations of their data for EUR 40[1] per month. You don't even get the vector data so you can analyse it or incorporate it in a product.

[1] https://www.cadastre.bg/podzakonovi-normatveni-aktove/tarifa...

To add to that, the public institutions in BG are in possession of a 0.5-0.3m/px orthophoto and a DEM with a similar resolution derived from it. This was acquired between 2016 and 2020 and entirely paid for with eurofunds.

You literally cannot get access to it, even if you want to pay let alone find it as an opendata dataset. Mind you, all military objects on it have been removed.

Slightly related to this, do you happen to know more about this topographic map [1] of Bulgaria and its surroundings?

[1] http://web.uni-plovdiv.bg/vedrin/#section2

I was curious if it be possible to somehow integrate the data from there on a geo-referenced map, maybe there are some instructions on that page pertaining to that but unfortunately I do not know Bulgarian.

I'm one of your neighbours from the North (I'm Romanian) and one of my side-projects involves geo-locating some toponyms that I find interesting (like toponyms indicating the names of some fortifications, for example, which would be gradishte in Bulgarian if I'm not mistaken). For the territory of Romania I managed to do that by integrating some Romanian military topographic maps with OpenLayers, I was thinking of extending my project to the entire Balkan area (that's why integrating those topographic maps of Bulgaria with something like OpenLayers or Leaflet would help me immensely).

> Slightly related to this, do you happen to know more about this topographic map [1] of Bulgaria and its surroundings?

This is the first time I see this map. I will definitely look into it.

The only official topo maps I know of are the ones produced in M1:5000 in the 50s to 70s and the M1:10000 produced in the 70s-80s. They're sold in a raster format by the sheet, so are completely useless to you.

On the toponyms part though, there's the official registry of toponyms that is openly accessible but not open-data. You can download it in its entirety thereby breaking copyright law:

https://geonames.cadastre.bg/

Here's a preview of a search for "градище": https://i.imgur.com/7NPFoPz.png

Note the EU funds info box and annoyingly the copyright label below it.

> toponyms that is openly accessible but not open-data. Y

Thank you a lot, that helps.

> Here's a preview of a search for "градище":https://i.imgur.com/7NPFoPz.png

That helps even more, thank you again!

I'm not doing this for any monetary gains and most probably the data/project will only be accessed by a handful of people really interested in this sort of stuff, so hopefully no-one will come after me :)

I am a little dissapointed was hoping for a bit more in terms of an aggregation of all the disparate geospatial agency's datasets!

It would be great to have a centralised place instead of having to go through the Irish geoportal, then navigate Bavaria's own series of portals, so on and so for for each country and sub-state (and even city).

Something like New Zealand has https://data.linz.govt.nz/data/

I agree that this would be very nice but I also shudder thinking about being the person whos job it would be to do the centralization.

Nice... another government sponsored project / website.

Why not simple pay/hire a bunch of geeks to upload all this data to an already existing platform, namely OpenStreetmaps.org ?

So this is where my European tax-euro's go to...

Because if you do it redundantly, you can put your propaganda sticker on it.

Are you a part of the OSM community? Last time I checked bulk inserting data from official datasets was not always welcome[1]. There's also the following glaring issue:

> Licenses - We are only interested in 'free' data. In fact we must be able to release their data with our OpenStreetMap License. This means it's OK to use Public Domain data; for other sources, please check license compatibility.

While I would definitely like to see official datasets get incorporated into OSM, an initiative to make public institutions embrace openness and data re-use is required beforehand. Then there are the technical difficulties of synchronizing OSM with the latest official data and ensuring correctness.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potential_Datasources

Looking at the license terms [1] this looks like another case of open-washing to me...

[1] https://www.mapsforeurope.org/licence

It seems between CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA-ND, with the ND aspect only pertaining to mutilating/distorting in a way prejudical to the honor and reputation of the copyright holders.

I wonder how one could mutilate a map such to prejudice the honour of a copyright holder.

> "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?"

- Romans 9:21 (KJV)

Having the Dutch province of Groningen inundated by the sea is a bit premature perhaps (render bug?).

Can't even get down to street level. Larger highways, but that's it.

But large scale maps ("street level") are quite simple. You can generate those for yourself with ease. It's the small scale maps that seem to suck more often -- simplifications are hard.

Makes you wonder why this was not properly done 10 years ago.

It’s like, on one side we pay taxes to people who build roads and maintain databases and maps of what they have built (the government)

On the other side, we (indirectly) pay for Google to run around with car to re-map everything as if the data did not exist in the first place.

Seems quite inefficient, no?

Details and resolutions, that must be a joke in 2021.

> Co-financed by the European Union

very nice to see where taxes go.

I'm so exasperated with this extreme anti-government slant on this website. Just so disappointing.

Expressing disappointment at the quality of a taxpayer-funded project is not the same as “anti-government slant”.

This is the state of online rhetoric, where disagreeing with someone is “hating”.

What is your specific complaint with details here?

As for resolution...ESRI shapefiles are vector files, they don't have a resolution.

My complaint about details is that the maximum zoom has an approximate resolution of 1cm/km, just try it out. Is that unreasonable to ask for something more precise in 2021?

If some public money had to be spent to fund an alternative to Google Maps / Maps.me / etc., this could have been rather used to help some open source projects such as OpenStreetMap

> Is that unreasonable to ask for something more precise in 2021?

As I pointed out below, simplifications are difficult. Lots of OSM-derived basemaps are fine when you zoom in but look daft at small scales (for example check out https://www.baremaps.com/assets/demo.html for this phenomenon). So if this map provides you with a good look at a small scale, adding in the details should be fairly easy. Doing it the other way around seems much tougher.

> If some public money had to be spent to fund an alternative to Google Maps / Maps.me / etc.

Very nitpicky, but Maps.me is/uses OpenStreetMap.

I think I missed something in these maps (actually the reason for the maps).

The resolution is ridiculous, I do not even see my city (almost 100k inhabitants).

The aerial view is hardly usable except if one is interested in geographical investigations.

My honest question i s: what are these maps for? What is in there that there is not somewhere else?

Does anyone know why EuroDEM has no height information for Germany?

https://www.mapsforeurope.org/explore-map/euro-dem

this report from UNGGIM shows that Federal mapping around the world is very inconsistant, missing parts are more common than you might think

https://www.isprs.org/documents/reports/The_Status_of_Topogr...

*Note: Europe does not include the two largest countries in Europe in this case.

Russia and Ukraine?

It does contain a bit of Russia though.

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