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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

But is it really global? For example Kabul only has 2 roads on tomtom

So the real question is: Is it complete? Not "is it global". But I'm sure OpenStreetMap is incomplete as well, although maybe less incomplete than others.

I think there's a difference between being incomplete and effectively not having mapped a country at all.

Probably the biggest problem with OSM (that the likes of GM doesn't have) is inconsistant coverage within a country. GM will be pretty consistant in how well mapped a country is all over the country, whereas OSM might have one city mapped very well, but another region be very blank.

look around in remote places in Google or Bing maps and you will find similar incomplete coverage

Doesn't even have to be that remote: Google Maps coverage of Crete is surprisingly bad. Not only is it incomplete, but it's also wrong in a number of places, e.g. mislabeling footpaths as roads (and gated private driveways as roads, and miscellaneous other things you can't drive on).

It's a business, so they update the maps, where it makes the most sense from a business point of view. Making quality maps is a very labor intense task and looks simpler from the outside, than it actually is. google for instance has more people working on their maps than TomTom has employees in total (which is betweem 3k and 4k). That's how intense it is...

(full disclosure: I worked in TomToms maps division for 7 years).

So I think you're actually agreeing with the OP. "where it makes the most sense from a business point of view" is a subset of "global".

Your point about the amount of effort to curate map data is well taken, too. But doesn't that mean that a crowdsourced approach makes sense? It might be possible to build a data set that no one company could afford to pay to build.

Every map is a subset of global - it's inevitable that there are newly built roads, private roads that mapping companies can't reach, dirt tracks that no-one has reported as missing from maps, temporary roads, roads that can't be seen in aerial photographs and so on. OSM also has omissions in areas where there aren't any OSM volunteers nearby to do the mapping.

The question is what distribution of omissions is acceptable before a map ceases to be global :)

It makes sense, where the data is available to you, but modern maps contain attribution that has to be licensed from 3rd parties(RDS/TMC codes for instance). You cannot include those, since you don't own the copyright.

Another example was the 7-digit postal codes in the UK: Before the UK did this big open data push, those had to be licensed as well.

I am all for open maps, but some things are just impossible to do legally with OSM.

Bangalore, India is not detailed either.

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