Placemark: Create, edit, and convert the data that powers maps | Hacker News Reader

Placemark: Create, edit, and convert the data that powers maps

placemark.io

82 pointstreycopeland7 comments

Tom has been developing a lot of this in the open on Twitter - on https://twitter.com/placemarkio and https://twitter.com/tmcw

Both are well worth the follow.

I'm super excited about this product and happy for Tom that he launched it. We've needed a good web app for editing and publishing simple maps for a long time now.

The announcement post is at https://www.placemark.io/post/announcing-placemark

As someone who loves OSM (and noticed that you've contributed to it), I'm trying to understand how Placemark fits in.

It seems like a system designed to make it easier for people to create and work with their own geospatial data silos

Does it provide a way to enable users to provide their data to OSM?

edit: this snippet from the comparisons page seems misleading:

> OpenStreetMap provides the map data that you see in Mapbox's base maps, as well as lots of other places on the internet. OpenStreetMap (OSM) allows map editing through the iD editor (which the creator of Placemark also worked on in its early stages), but the OpenStreetMap map is public, shared between everyone, and strictly refers to certain kinds of data like streets and businesses.

OSM includes tons of other types of data, such as natural features, public utilities (e.g. free wifi, water fountains), and much, much more.

Sure! So OpenStreetMap is great, and there’s a ton of data in it. There will be ways to move data from Placemark to OSM, but the main way to edit OSM will still be specialized editors like iD or JOSM.

As much as OSM contains, though, there are limits - data that isn’t “ground truth,” like planned routes or opinionated data, or geospatial data with private information, or data that’s annotations of particular satellite imagery.

Hope that makes things a little clearer! I was part of the team to create iD, the OSM editor, and am a big fan of OSM - Placemark serves a different purpose.

We use http://geojson.io/ regularly do convert data formats, inspect *.geojson files or other map related work. All inside the browser. It's open source, still maintained but IMHO reached a stage where it had to become a commerical, optionated, supported product. Or rather a different product like Placemark to fill the niche. Too many users had different use cases for geojson.io, sharing files with others is cumbersome and some features on the wishlist are super complex to build.

During testing I was able to load a 40.000 points data file (large cities and some attributes like name, elevation) into Placemark and browse around, search, filter, add new points fine. It's a powerful tool. The monthly pricing likely only attract users in the geospatial industry and companies so hopefully the marketed is big enough to generate enough revenue. I'm looking forward to some kind of CLI tool or API to auto-upload/download files to fit our workflow at some point.

Thanks! Just in case it isn’t clear, geojson.io is from the same folks (okay, folk, me) as Placemark. My hope with Placemark is to keep maintaining it and improving it, while unfortunately geojson.io has been untouched for a few years.

I use placemark regularly and love it. Geojson is a remarkable format and being able to collaboratively look at a map with colleagues is a necessity. Google Earth is very tired at this point...it still works, it's just tired. The web version is mediocre and you also have to give you maps to Google.

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