Open Street Map – The Free Wiki World Map | Hacker News Reader

Open Street Map – The Free Wiki World Map

openstreetmap.org

36 pointsgnosis15 comments

Open Street Map is interesting. I decided to check out an obscure suburb where I used to live (because the data for New York City is obviously going to be fine). One issue that has been debated there for the last 30 years, it seems, is extending a freeway called Route 53. The project is called "FAP 342".

Open Street Map shows this thing as built and existing: http://osm.org/go/ZVItJYIM-

Very confusing, as it is definitely not built (and probably never will be).

Openstreetmap shows it as not yet finished, and i it does not yet exist, that seems to be correct.

Check the map key. The FAP 342 and FAP 420 are set as "under construction", not built and existing.

The idea is that you now go in and edit the status of this road from "under construction" to something more appropriate. The problem of course is that editing the map [1] is a lot more difficult than editing a Wikipedia page, which is why less people are participating.

I think it's also worth mentioning that in places other than your suburb, OSM is better than other publicly available maps, see for example [2].

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide_1.3

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/mar/28/openstre...

Why the heck is this on front page of HN? I am flagging it now. Apparently there are still people haven't heard of this and this is why reposts will always be popular.

From the HN Guidelines[1]:

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

[1] - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for heads up, I didn't know that.

http://wikimapia.org/ is another good one. Allows for annotating buildings etc. in the satellite view.

Keep in mind that WikiMapia is breaking Google's terms of use and they don't release the data they collect. It's a neat project, but completely orthogonal to OSM.

i still find it very difficult to read. much harder than google's tiles.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=48.8432&lon=2.356&... vs https://maps.google.com/maps?q=48.8432,+2.356&hl=en&...

here's a google cache of an analysis from a while back:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:k2wum-J...

Well that's a matter of cartographic style, which is only small part of what goes into creating a map like this. The nice thing about OpenStreetMap is that it supplies the raw data to enable all manner of map style experimentation, so actually there's lots of different maps powered by OpenStreetMap, some more difficult to read than others. You might find 'MapQuest' style is more pleasing on the eye. http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=48.8432&lon=2.356&... Same data. Different map style. More details here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparision_Google_servic...

Keep in mind that OpenStreetMap is a data project, not a maps.google.com replacement project. There are plenty of other ways to look at OSM data. https://tiles.mapbox.com/newmap and http://maps.cloudmade.com/editor let you style the data yourself, http://open.mapquest.com/ lets you route and search across it. https://github.com/mapbox/osm-bright is a good start at building your own style. http://osmbuildings.com/ uses CSS to draw 3D buildings based on OSM data. http://bl.ocks.org/migurski/5130639 renders it in your browser with WebGL.

The tiles shown at openstreetmap.org are meant as a tool for mappers to help with mapping and are not our product.

foursquare switched to OSM last year after google changed its maps API pricing: http://blog.foursquare.com/2012/02/29/foursquare-is-joining-...

link to the homepage of openstreetmap??

I was surprised too. Lots of karma whoring around here?

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