Comment by pkh80 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkh80 | Hacker News Reader

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This comment will probably get buried and no-one cares, but...

OSM, although a great force for good in the mapping world, is not in its current state a viable competitor to Google Maps and other paid datasets.

You need to start driving around, using LIDAR, and create a massive parcel / address database to really do it right.

You need photos, from the street and from the air. For OSM to really fly we need to see open source hardware combining photography, GPS, LIDAR, that folks can strap to their cars or fly from RC planes or balloons or kites.

Geocoding needs to actually work, worldwide. That's incredibly hard. Its so much more than the visual maps.

Just pointing this all out, since everyone seems to gloss over the fact that Google Maps has a massive monopoly in this area right now.

So in other words, OSM has done a pretty good job of mapping the _streets_ of the world, and now it's time to shift the focus to recording the individual _address points_ along those streets?

AFAIK, the tags to use for individual address points have been agreed upon, and in some parts of the world (e.g. Germany, where the maps are essentially finished) this address point data is already useful. Is this, in fact, the case?

As with everything in OSM, it depends on which country you are talking about. For example, I believe in (at least some areas of) France the outline of every building has been imported from a high quality government source with address data yet the roads still have to be drawn in from satellite photos or GPS traces.

The US is the home base of Google (amongst other big name tech companies) but it's OSM data is amongst the worst. This is ironic as much of the open data used to map the rest of the world was provided by the US government e.g. NASA radar topography and Landsat photos.

But for the lower level data the best source (often the definitive source e.g. for administrative boundaries that aren't physically present on the ground) is government data, so the quantity and quality of data varies as you cross state (and sometimes county) lines.

And I would like to add that in places where people added addresses they are usually much more accurate and detailed than Google's.

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