It’s Time to Make OpenStreetMap Your Only Street Map
stevecoast.com
stevecoast.com
I mean, I value simplicity, especially on the go, and the OSM-based softwares I've tried are by no mean perfect. But with recent versions of Google Map, I have difficulties:
* bookmarking my current location, especially when offline
* getting a scale displayed on my map (a scaleless map was a mandatory Fail in geography classes)
* giving itinerary boundaries through clicks
* sharing a marker as a public URL
* getting rid of research results once I've seen them
And whenever I find a contrived way to do one of those things, more often than not, a couple of weeks later it's taken out by a new "simplification". I'll grant you that maps looks nicer and nicer, but it becomes less and less usable at an alarming speed.
Check it and tell here or directly via email info@galileo-app.com your opinion or ideas about improvement. :)
p.s. It's iOS only.
I looked it up on my iPhone and for some reason the search results showed a different (old?) icon.
Tapping into the detail view shows the latest icon — a tremendous improvement there! :-)
We use old icon for iOS6 devices. For those who don't like flat design we keep old good 3D icon.
And there is also a confusing bug in the App Store. It shows old icon for iOS7 devices, and new one for iOS6. But when app is installed it displays correct icon.
Two suggestions: allow me to download a whole country at once, without per-land or per-state confirmations (maybe paid feature?), and change the "less points" label to read "fewer points" under settings/gps filtering/distance threshold.
I may have more after playing with it for a while.
But I disagree with whole country download. From one side it's good to have map of all country, but you'll have to download 2Gb, it will take 4Gb on your device, we'll pay much more for traffic, and finally you'll never visit all states in USA. :)
Waiting for more feedback.
I travel a lot, often unexpectedly, and I have a 128GB iPad for precisely that reason.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/mJEwSTNR...
It's hard to search for a street. It's harder to search for a Hotel The overlays (maybe I could tweak them) showed me useless things and not even the central station.
I really tried to like it, but so far... not gonna happen.
* long press point on map, bottom bar, Save
* scale at the bottom right appears when zooming (unfortunately it disappears after a few seconds)
* no idea
* long press point on map, bottom bar, Share
* press map closes the bottom bar. or press the back button.
I've found this to be the trend with every Google product. Take a look at what they did to Deja News -- pretty soon Maps won't even exist, either.
This seems to be a running gag for all of Google's services, the past few years. Like moving around and changing the "log out" button (did I say button, it's a link now), then for a while inconveniencing people circumventing that via Private Tab. It's awful.
It's like they're trying to numb you into compliance to go with whatever flow the UI-of-the-week directs you into.
That said, every time I look at an OSM map, I find them uglier and far less usable than google maps.
Here's the Sochi example using OSM's Transport layer (which is less cluttered):
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/43.5883/39.7263&layers=...
vs:
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=sochi&aq=&sll=37.0625,-95.677...
If I had to navigate Sochi, I would overwhelmingly prefer Google's version. It's cleaner, has better contrast and a number of subtle touches (english translations, one-way arrows, ...). When I travel, I always download offline OSM maps, in case, but eagerly get a SIM card with a data plan and switch to Google Maps (and I suddenly find myself better oriented).
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/43.5883/39.7263&layers=...
The rendering style you picked is certainly different than Google's. MapQuest Open's rendering style is pretty darn close to the Google Maps link you pointed at [0], and other map providers like MapBox let you build maps with styling how you like it in just a few clicks (including picking English labels when known). I made one just now [1].
We don't do a great job of making the point when you arrive at osm.org, but we aren't competing with Google Maps. We're competing with Navteq/Nokia and other map data providers.
[0] http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/43.5883/39.7236&layers=... [1] https://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/iandees.h675i5pf/page.html?sec...
A solution is to make the tiles half the size, but then all the labels are tiny. In addition to this, I dislike Mapquest Open's tiles because they're subject to jpeg compression. Unfortunately, it's the only free tile service out there without usage limits.
If you want seven billion people using it, it's going to be quite necessary to create a consumer-facing canonical front-end.
I'm sure you can get lots of volunteer hackers to contribute if you throw up an MVP on github.
Instead, there's room for Valve's SteamOS, Google's Android, Google's ChromeOS, Canonical's Ubuntu and many more, both commercial and community focused, competing in some ways, collaborating in others.
This announcement is one company that did exactly that, and provided a consumer-facing product built on OSM, who just got bought by a bigger producer of consumer-facing products who intend to do the same on an even bigger scale.
libpcap has tcpdump. linux has ubuntu. http has nginx (and previously, apache).
It would be great if there were a canonical frontend stack for OSM that we could all hack on to make as usable as Google Maps. It should be hosted somewhere central but also ship with easy chef or puppet configs to deploy a stack yourself easily.
I'd get tons of use out of something like that, and I'd contribute to the code, too.
Monolithic engines are great for getting 80% of what your exact requirements are, then you're stuck with a bulky system that you're probably only using 10% of, and it doesn't do the other 10% of what you need.
Something like leaflet.js is nice because it gives you a simple way to present layers on a device, and it's modular meaning you can plug in extra behaviors or develop your own easily.
If a similar approach were taken for the other problem areas, like route finding, traffic monitoring, etc, I'd much prefer that over a bulky platform I'd never want to use the entirety of for any one project.
Of course once these modular components mature enough, no doubt soon, they will be packaged into some service that with a few simple clicks of a button generates the right combination to suit your requirement.
tl;dr OSM should do the data collation and serving and be good at that. Other services should spring up to do their magic with that data. And yet other services should provide easy ways to thread it altogether for a whole world of possible use-cases. (all IMHO of course...)
And this article is the equivalent of say, Canonical taking Debian and saying they're going to make an easy to use desktop linux from it. It will almost certainly be more "polished" and end-user focused than openstreetmap.org, because they serve two different types of users.
Interestingly Wikipedia are actually a user facing front-end for OpenStreetmap data, in fact they have at least 4 projects using slightly different tech to put different front-ends on OSM as appropriate for their usage, e.g. the official Android app uses MapQuest OSM tiles to show articles that relate to your physical surroundings:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia&...
and the german wikipedia has a couple of gadgets in the top right hand corner to show the geographical context of the articles:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongo_%28Fluss%29
They also extract a lot of vector data from OSM to hand built appropriate maps and diagrams for articles:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aruba_travel_map.png
Again, not always what I'd call polished, but they're making creative use of map data, rather than putting some pins on Google Maps (or on an OSM based clone) and that's a good thing.
This is quite belittling to the thousands of hours professionals have put into the OSM tools, infrastructure & interface over the years.
But this is hacker news, home of armchair pundits.
Mapbox comes to mind, but it is a proprietary service, not open source.
I guess I'm wondering why enabling people to build an entirely free/oss mapbox isn't near the top of their priority list.
If you want to render polished maps, you use Mapnik (developed outside, creators hired by Mapbox), probably creating your stylesheets in CartoCSS (developed by Mapbox) and using the friendly TileMill wrapper for prototyping (developed by Mapbox). If you want to do routing, you use OSRM (developed outside, creator hired by Mapbox). And so on.
So for your question, there absolutely is such an open source tool, and it's called Mapnik. Download it (maybe as part of TileMill) and have a play.
The majority of the people who interact with OSM will get a perception of it that's biased by the presentation. Even with the MapQuest Open style, Google Maps, to me, are far more pleasant to look at and easier to understand. The text seems to be rendered in a better, more readable way, and GMaps has a better handle on decreasing contrast for things that aren't that important, allowing more important features to stand out.
You can tell me that I shouldn't care, because you provide such awesome data, and I'm tempted to agree, but my reptilian brain will give me opposite feelings every time I try to look at your maps.
OSM doesn't have to "sell" their maps. It's the folks like Telenav that need to make their maps look better.
They certainly do if "I’d like it to get OSM to seven billion contributors in the next year or two"
There needs to be separate organizations to package and distribute this data and make apps for it. (A web map project will have different needs than an offline phone navigation app. OSM shouldn't try to gain/maintain domain expertise in everything.)
I think its a good example of data > render, with ux in the front of mind. Unfortunately we are good at the read case, not as good at the contribute case.
Of course you are. That's why there is a comparison of OSM and Google Maps smack in the middle of the blog post we're all talking about. User mindshare matters as much as developer mindshare.
The reality is that if OSM is to scale to 7 billion users it itself can _not_ be the provider of all the tiles. The amount of infrastructure that this would require would be prohibitive for a nonprofit. Rendering & serving map tiles isn't like serving wikipedia pages.
I agree the default OSM map is a bit ... pink. and yellow. and then blue. but at least it isn't Simpsons Yellow like default google. but see the link I posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7174856 for more free examples
When I look at OSM for a city that I know well, i'm not nearly as overwhelmed and I do find the information quite handy. Two different use cases, I guess.
http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?lon=40.29583&lat=43.67232&zoom...
Yes, the OSM map is busier. Because it has the entire Olympic venue on it, wheras Google Maps shows it as empty space. Open, contribution-friendly data is a great thing.
In the Sochi example, take a look at the park to the left. OSM displays all the footpaths in the park, Google Maps display none. This is a running theme: all the red dashed lines are pedestrian rights of way that Google simply doesn't know about.
What if you wanted to cross the railway line on foot? You'd be out of luck with Google Maps...
And while we're looking at the railway, notice anything missing from Google Maps? Only the largest road (looks to be a highway) on the map! It seems like this is new and has yet to be added by the Google Maps team.
OSM has been shown to have more detailed data for many Asian and European countries (like Russia, in our example) than Google Maps, and this serves to make those maps "look more cluttered". But if I was visiting Sochi, I know which map I'd rather be using.
Do note that then you might miss a few details that Google doesn't yet include, like, say, the highway A-148 that now goes through the centre of town...
That's why you use OSM, not because it's prettier, but because it has more detail, and it's more up to date.
Setting aside ideological purity, the actual rationality of switching solely to OSM depends on the actual quality and freshness of its data. And most of the world with money in play is more likely to follow rationality than ideological purity here.
But with regard to data quality, OSM is encumbered its own policy. OSM cannot (or refuses to) make use of high-quality bulk data from outside, regardless of how that data was licensed. Automation allows more frequent updates with a lot less manual labor as input - but OSM requires contributors to manually trace shapes in their weird browser app. Even where plenty of excellent liberally licensed data is available, OSM insists on making an army of unpaid monkeys re-make the SAME data in perpetuity.
That puts its pipeline at a permanent disadvantage to companies building proprietary datasets, which can take advantage of all kinds of automation. OSM simply isn't doing as much as it could to verify its data and stay fresh, and so it isn't doing as much as it could to end the status quo of proprietary data. Even if OSM reaches a usable state at a given moment, the world keeps changing to invalidate previously traced data, and OSM's policy ensures it will always be playing catch-up no matter who wants to donate data, because all the data has to come through this dopey manual process.
There is however a wariness to use it too much since maintenance and community building both suffer.
It has been found that encouraging a community around the data collection creates much better data in the long run. An involved community can go beyond what is provided by other datasets and do more than can be done with 'tracing'.
There's more to OSM that road centre-lines and building outlines.
Nine years' experience is that a community of people is the best way to make good data and keep it up-to-date.
Why do you think OSM isn't capable of utilizing automated processes? If anything, the manual editing process allows OSM to catch the long-tail data touch-ups that automated processes will never be able to handle.
Oh. I think yes this is scalable. I'll give folks some examples of how crowd-sourcing works like this, and how it can be scalable.
1. A person knows where they live, they can add their own street. They may know their neighbourhood, they can map it from scratch, or more likely keep it up to date. The user may see that their family home or where they vacation needs a tweak here and there, and pops on and edits. It's very casual, very local based monitoring and editing. This is scalable in the sense that it's small tasks that take a small time.
2. Based on an academic evaluation of a countries government's base map and OSM, several places are shown to be less well covered in OSM. These are targets for more dedicated mappers to examine, on foot, or with aerial imagery to improve. Hardcore mappers mainly here, large tasks, large time.
3. Mapping workshops are held in a small town to blitz a new development, fill holes and cover an entire area all at once. Twenty participants can do a large area with transport and the right equipment.
4. web based task manager is set up to allocate squares of land for people to trace from, dozens of people can take a small square and trace over the top. Local knowledge can then quickly add in names and landmarks.
So you can see that there are a number of different crowd-sourced labour approaches which would replicate what an import would do, but that by crowdsourcing you actually increase the number of people in that labour pool. An import does not help increase the number of contributors.
Now, this is more scalable in developed countries where there are more people with time to donate (same applies to any unpaid crowdsourced project), and so that example no. 1 in developing countries of an organic community keeping things up to date wouldn't really happen. However it's quite widespread in the developing world that there are no proprietary datasets of any decent quality. Imports could not even be considered in these places.
A recent push is to make sure that people doing imports have some sort of plan for updating and maintaining the imported data.
So it isn't 'cannot or refuse to make use of', it is more 'not interested in being a dumping ground for anything and everything'.
Whereas some other countries seem to have had better sources of data available and got on with the job of figuring out the best ways to import them without making a mess.
I like the current assisted approach of letting you turn on a TIGER 2012 overlay in the editor, and/or use tools like the "TIGER 2012 Battlegrid" (http://maproulette.org/battlegrid/) to find where OSM/TIGER differ.
So far based on some limited experience fixing OSM based on those tools, it's a good decision imo not to do it in an automated fashion, because when I've found OSM/TIGER differences, it was about 50/50 which of the two was right.
What this viewpoint does hint at is it's comparison to Wikipedia, and the differences in geospatial data of a current map of the world. Pekk is correct, an area in OSM needs to be continually updated and refreshed, and this requires appropriate tools and a user base. Both of these exist or are being improved upon with OSM.
For example, work has happened re: Monitoring of changes, comparisons with imagery, map bug reports, automated feeds, academic and industry reports and evaluations of the quality with proprietary and national mapping agency datasets.
Proprietary geospatial data can be very hit and miss. If you assume that the majority will be high quality, you're setting yourself up for disappointment...
See also the recent buzz around gcc (TL;DR: gcc is about freeing users from proprietary implementations, not about having the best product ever), and Wikipedia (everybody knows something, Wikipedia is here to share this knowledge and make sure it can't be withheld)
There is actually not a lot of "high quality bulk data" out there. What datasets are you thinking of?
Remember OSM is "open data", so you can't import propriatary data. Some bulk datasets might not allow commerical reuse, or might forbid derivative works (i.e. no-one can change it).
> OSM requires contributors to manually trace shapes in their weird browser app
There are many editors. iD is the browser app. There's JOSM a desktop, advanced app. And you can always upload raw data via the API.
Because a person who rationally cares about great map data for their whole lives, and also cares about other things (like liberty) might well prefer the growing pains of being an earlier adopter to the instant convenience of using Google Maps.
I understand that you, like many people, have decided that the attributes you care about are the only ones that are rational to care about. But that is a gross mistake, and that mistake undermines the entire premise of your rant.
Do you think you could squeze some more status posturing out of your choice of software products?
As another example within GPS, Waze used to give truly horrendous routes, as it would often fail to understand the difference between overpasses and intersections. A bunch of early adopters liked the promise of Waze and helped crowd-source the fixes, so that now Waze is a very good navigator.
By the OP's logic, the early adopters who helped make Waze great were irrational, because it truly was worse for quite a long time.
That said, I get it, you're just here to snark at strangers. After all, if you'd had even a hint of an interest in a real conversation you would've realized I never stated that any set of attributes was better than any other, nor that my interpretation of attribute definitions was the only valid one.
Anyway, thanks for the snarky bullshit and have a nice day.
Only for those who speak with ignorance...
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm#BitTorrent
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/PBF (format documentation)
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features (common tag strings)
edit: This was my first render from this weekend, http://i.imgur.com/vD9d39W.png :D
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Photon http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim
But most consumers aren't using the data as organized in the planet file, they are generating extracts based on extent or whatever criteria, and usually processing the data into some data model that is better for the work they are doing.
http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-geodatabases....
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim/Installation#I....
What a nice link.
The deep link to the 22GB Version: http://osm-torrent.torres.voyager.hr/files/planet-latest.osm...
The UI is not perfect, but it has lots of useful features, like bike navigation and offline usage.
When I finally get the results of my query for "Hammersmith" it tells me that 309km away (some mistake, more like 3.9km) there is "Subway Station District Line;Hammersmith & City Line", and then the same result repeated around 150 times some with slightly different naming, and at varying distances from 309-328km away before it gets to other results in Hammersmith.
And you are trying to use this on a phone in the rain, you just give up and go back to google maps even though the data is worse.
EDIT: And if you select one of these it appears to be in Barking, as it found every station on the Hammersmith and City Line, although that is not 300km long.
I'm not sure how it could remain as featureful as it is and improve the UI. So I'm quite happy with it.
I do use Navit [1] offline navigation which I belive uses offline maps based on OpenStreetMap. GUI is a bit quirky, but it works. Offline maps are downloaded from the application. I use simply snapshots apks from Navit's download page [2].
I've encoutered some bugs in the maps for new build roads. New means few weeks, but it otherwise works very good. It can be used as car navigation because energy consumption is rather fast so connecting to a car charger is a must.
[1] http://www.navit-project.org/ [2] http://download.navit-project.org/navit/android/svn/
Another app that has been praised by a lot of people is CityMaps2go [0], both on Android and iOs. While the application is not open-source (which is why I don't use it), the underlying data comes from OSM, so by using this application you're fighting for OSM.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ulmon.andr...
Indeed, the navigation works great IF you can remember how to work the UI. Never the less, I'm still in awe as how well accurate OSM is (in the Netherlands + Belgium).
The number one huge win for Osmand is offline searching for points of interest. Being able to to pull up a list of all playgrounds close to where I am right now is invaluable when traveling with a hyperactive 3 year old.
I'm guessing there's a bunch of other niche apps, that do the same kind of thing (e.g. I'm vaguely aware of Wheelmap for wheelchair users).
We are based on OSM, and while not perfect, we are pretty satisfied with it. If you want to give it a try to see how it looks, you can see it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.bikecitygu... (you can test it for free and if anyone is interested in coupons let me know)
One of the main advantages for us is that we made an in-house routing algorithm so routing is done on your phone, that means that you don't need an internet connection while routing, but for that we need to download the maps, of course this is not possible with proprietary maps like Google Maps.
At the moment we're only in Europe and the map quality has been pretty good. We're are having some problems with some cities, like Madrid with the direction of the streets, but you know what's awesome, that when we get a mail from a customer telling us that this and that is wrong, we can reply them in a couple of hours telling them that the issue was fixed and it will be deployed in update.
Interestingly, Apple Maps, Mapquest, and Bing maps all have the right street name. After I submitted the PR to OSM, it's correct now, too. Only Google Maps is still wrong, which is unfortunate, since that seems to be the one most people rely on (especially w.r.t phone GPS's). I've had several instances of friends calling, confused on how to reach my house, after their Google Maps App took them to a house a few blocks away.
Don't get me wrong, it has its uses, but those two components are too critical to ignore or even advocate for full replacement.
The way most geocoders work is by having street segments that are split at certain points and have from/to ranges of addresses. Here is a SO questions I asked many years ago that explains the logic:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10991330/how-does-the-goo...
In the US, a big chunk of OSM is based on a Tiger ingest. Tiger already had the segments split with the ranges (albeit some areas are not that accurate). In theory, you could still have a nice geocoder for US (the same is true for other countries like Germany).
The current crowdsourcing workflow of how people edit data in OSM makes it attractive for display (i.e. there is no need to split the street segments and add the address ranges for "pretty display"). But it also causes people to not edit the address ranges, snap the edges, etc, which just means that as a routing or geocoding dataset it is arguably actually worse.
You don't need _all_ the addresses to geocode. In theory, you could start with a particular country, clean it up for that problem. But right now, that is not the emphasis of OSM. The emphasis is a pretty base layer. For that OSM is awesome. For routing and geocoding, not so much.
Search for Navstreets Reference Manual for an example of Navteq's complicated schema for routing: https://www.google.com/search?q=navstreets+reference+manual
I really wish OSM was good enough for those two things... right now, it is not there yet.
You can already do that.
Routing is in the works (see https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issue...). For now you can use http://map.project-osrm.org/ but having it in plain sight on osm.org will definitely be better
Last time I checked (just now), this still didn't get me any useful results from OSM for the European capitals I frequent (Rome, Paris, Berlin). I guess it is even worse for smaller cities.
Yes, there is some venue/business data. But it is too sparse, at least for most of Europe, for OSM to be a useful replacement for Google Maps -- even in the medium term.
The question would be: how could this be rapidly improved? For example, I entered probably two dozen places that were missing on Google Maps, in the past. While this data is now Google's, I entered it, originally. What's more, if I would be adding it again, to OSM, I'd certainly enter the same data.
I wonder what the legal perspective would be if everyone crawled "their" data (i.e. the data they personally entered) from Google maps and forwarded it to OSM.
So going to a place and searching for 'fastfood' returns objects from around the world based on the name matching 'fastfood'. A more structured input, like 'fast food, detroit, mi' returns something more sensible (but it is still searching the city limits of Detroit, not the metro area).
So the machinery there provides information, but it is not set up for end user situations.
Not necessarily. It depends on what the geocoding software does. It might use rigid "city" borders, or might not. In Europe, we don't have these rigid "city borders", so lots of software has to cope with that.
Also the search function is stupid. Say, I am zoomed into a city and enter a term. Instead of searching the city I am looking at, it searches the whole world.
Or lets say I searched for a restaurant. When I am zoomed into the max, Google Maps will show me all restaurants around the area (that makes sense, doesn't it)?
That's just basic UX stuff which, until fixed, will prevent people from using this over Google maps. Or rather: if will prevent people like me, to advertise it to their non-hacker friends, as I know, stuff like this will make them have a hard time and later tell me "it didn't work for me"
I guess what I'm trying to say is: OSM needs to be as useable as GM, before people will switch in masses.
Add more data to OSM! Placenames, neighboud names, road names, add pubs, restaurants, venues, with their names and addresses!
I wonder what the legal perspective would be if everyone crawled "their" data (i.e. the data they personally entered) from Google maps and forwarded it to OSM.
That would probably be against Google's ToS. However if the knowledge is still in your head, then you can just manually enter it into OSM.
The 'search' box on the front page uses Nominatim[1], a programme for turning lat/longs into addresses (and vice versa). If there's a bug or the output doesn't look right, feel free to submit an issue.
It works really well. Sadly they haven't updated the data on the Australian version in six months though.
I refuse to install Google Maps on iOS, because every time I've installed it on our FAMILY iPad, it keeps driving the user to sign in with MY account, which it appears to have weaseled out of the sandboxed Google+ for iOS. Sorry, but firstly I don't want to have a search history. Secondly I don't want the search history of the rest of family to be linked to my Google account.
I understand that some people might want to switch this on as a feature, byt I don't, and Google have designed the app, so that it seems like it won't work without signing in. A very dark UI pattern if you ask me. This whole assumption of one-device-one-person is naive.
Which makes sense, but I checked anyway as I had seen websites using other map services coupled with streeview.
Map data is free but serving maps is a service... Either you pay for it, suffer advertising or do it yourself - the first and last options are available from Openstreetmap.
The level of geographic information just isn't there to make it a viable first choice for me because orientation is more difficult.
Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, all have no problem finding my house.
One solution is to map your house using iD (the default editor when you click the "Edit" button on osm.org) and add the full address, including the city and postcode. With that extra information, the geocoder should be able to find your address. Feel free to e-mail me if you've got more questions.
If that's the case, they need to Gameify this pronto, like Duolingo does with crowd-sourced translations.
* Google Maps: everything you'd ever want, and correct.
* Open Street Map: a Home Depot in Riverside County, CA, and a Lowes which apparently resides inside the exact same building.
It is not time for me to make OpenStreetMap my only street map.
Maintaining all those locations would mean a lot of work ( Moneygram for example has around 300.000 locations [0]) that usually involves some sort of revenue, ie displaying ads like Google does.
[0] http://www.moneygram.com/MGICorp/campaigns/moneytransfer/ind... edit: added link
But I still haven't found an OSM editor that doesn't suck. And right now I don't have the time to write my own, even though I've considered it more than once...
Potlatch 2 was the main one before that, which wasn't as good but was adequate.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/30.33393/-95.47847 https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@30.3339269,-95.4784644,...
Not to mention that searching for "Conroe, TX" and taking the first, correct-sounding result got me ~10 miles south of city limits.
Now, Google has a couple of oddities, here (those two businesses apparently on the median between the freeway and the access road!), but the road data is more accurate and detailed (including street names).
I've done some editing on wikis, but I'm not going to try to jump in and correct that gap.
The search box on the OSM front page uses Nominatim, which also has it's own website. Here's the search results for that: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=Conroe%2C+TX... You can see the 2 results there http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=4274... and http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=9815... There's a "Report Problem" button to help debug issues like this. Feel free to submit a bug!
I think Nominatim tries to rank things based on how long their Wikipedia article, the the item to the south (that was at the top), is the one that links to Wikipedia. TBH it looks like bad mapping whoever put that there
If I see a place on the map.. Why can't I click on it? I can't get the address, telephone number, website etc.?
And I see and picture of a shopping basket? What is it? I also see a cocktail glass, it's a fucking mystery.
That functionality is possible, check out some PoCs:
http://r2d2.stefanm.com/mapnik/demo.html
http://overpass.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Tasks/Progress/Cl...
I posted nearly the same reply to the other "you gotta use OSM!" thread a few weeks ago.
Completely unusable as a replacement to apple or google maps, for me. Might be OK for looking for roads, like, uh, a street map - but to replace gmaps functionality with the simple feature of "click on an icon and show me the details" it is not.
http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFe...
I have a sneaking suspicion that once finally I replace Google Maps with OSM there won't be any compromises to be made.
I would say that where some services are lacking in that regard is geocoding, the spelling correction at Google is pretty hard to beat, addresses are incredibly hard to parse and Google has definitely and edge in that sense.
I'd love to have more complete metadata. No reason in 2014 I shouldn't be able to query pet-friendly hotels near brewpubs near bike trails.
Routing would also be nice :-)
http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?lon=39.7203&lat=43.58538&zoom=...
Google search and maps are the only google products I still use (well, plus youtube, but no account, and blogger, but only reading), and I use duckduckgo intermittently instead of google search, but OpenStreetMap just isn't good enough yet, primarily by nit having yet found a halfway decent mobile app.
Now the application has gone to the trouble of upgrading itself on my phone, without upgrading the actual maps, so it was completely useless last time I tried to use it.
You can help by wandering around with your smartphone's GPS turned on and uploading the traces to OSM.org for others to map with.
I think it's because the local government is contributing to OSM (or they got somebody to upload some government data).
I do hope that this app won't die. It's polished, it's user friendly, it's based on OSM (which for me is a feature) and worked very well for me.
Surely that's a typo. Nearly all the world's population contributing to, not just using, OSM? Seven million maybe?
ps: I wonder if there's an open, possibly smartphone/crowdsourced picture database to fill the lack of photographic/streetview data in OSM. Thinking about reconstructing algorithm as shown by Microsoft Research labs.
I can't. Your new app is US only, and osmand is good but not good enough.
Is there any nice description of the ecosystem around OSM data? How do all these companies providing routing or geocoding make money?
OpenStreetMaps still doesn't have street numbers.
Where data is good, OpenStreetMaps is a fantastic tool. But for the rest of the world - it's utterly useless.
If you want to make the world a better place, you could do some around your house as well!
"Why the world needs OpenStreetMap"
"It's Time to Make OpenStreetMap your only street map"
So no.