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Comment by jan_g | Hacker News Reader

Yep, 80% of my town is unmapped. The same goes for some other towns in neighboring areas that I've checked. Compared to Google maps it's just no good. I have no idea how or on what basis the blog author concluded that OSM is just as good or better then Google maps. Also, I didn't see the option for satellite view.

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Well, and my town is mapped perfectly. The difference is that with openstreetmaps, you can simply go and improve what could be better. Of course it doesn't change anything about the quality of the maps, just that you have a choice, as opposed to google maps with which you could possibly be stuck with an incorrect map.

And regarding satellite view, how would you even imagine volunteers making satellite images? Basically anyone can get a GPS receiver and make maps, but I have yet to see an amateur hobby satellite in orbit. (I guess you could use R/C planes with GPS and cameras, but that would be incredibly time-consuming and not ideal at large scales.) However, even if you could do that, it's just not goal of OpenStreetMap. You can't use satellite images for routing, there is no legend, etc.

And I think that they don't allow external satellite images because of their philosophy on freedom - similarly to you having to explicitly allow installing non-free packages in Debian.

I'm not arguing against open data model or users' contributions. On the contrary, I think it's great. I merely wanted to point out that at least for now it's not good enough. I'm also missing route planning/directions, however I may have missed it while browsing the site.

> And regarding satellite view, how would you even imagine volunteers making satellite images?

Across the world, I can't answer. Here in Western Australia, one of the largest single states in the world, there's been digital mapping for two decades now, predating the rise of Google maps.

Data from MODIS satellites is downloaded direct from the sats as they pass overhead and streamed to those with an interest. The better quality data comes from the aerial surveys performed each and every summer over populated areas which produce several thousand digital scans of wet negatives (they may have recently moved to high res digital in the planes, I've been out of the details for a few years).

Google didn't develop their mapping tech initially, they purchased the starting technology from Keyhole, a US based company (iirc), it's worth noting that several international companies had equal or better offerings that were considered including our locally developed technology from ermapper which is now owned by Lecia.

http://www.erdas.com/company/news/newsreleases/07-05-21/Leic...

As for volunteer contributions it's been our experience that if you provide data access and annotation tools then many competent people that care about ground accuracy (forestry services, land owners, search & rescue, exploration crews, etc) will happily add value.

Something that people don't get (as it's a tricky concept) is that OSM isn't primarily the online mapping you see at openstreetmap.org. Just like Linux or GNU isn't about a single distro or use case, OSM is a community and tools for building a variety of different user facing tools from a shared digital mapping infrastructure.

Also, the best of OSM is in places like Germany where in some areas they're mapping down to the level of individual trees and lampost locations as well as where animals are located within zoos.

http://bestofosm.org/#best-of-de-berlin-zoo

http://bestofosm.org/#best-of-ch-bern

http://bestofosm.org/#best-of-fr-strasbourg

The author is from Britain, which is much better mapped in OSM than the US.

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