The rise of OpenStreetMap: A quest to conquer Google’s mapping empire
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
OSM: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/48.2509/16.2533
Google Maps: https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q...
Do you have any ideas why? Did google simply deem it not profitable enough to send their camera-vans round bratislava, or are there particular reasons that make it more expensive there (regulations of some kind, a fuck-tonne of bureaucracy to get permission?)
Use the slider at the top.
Either a bit a fraction of a percent of a days profit or some data for OSM, sure either would be most acceptable.
"You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. The full legal code explains your rights and responsibilities."
If so, that's very nice but I am not sure that's what is actually happening: the third-party source whom they are licensing data from is unlikely to be happy with a scenario where their data ends up in the public domain as this considerably reduces the commercial value of their map data.
But Apple simply cannot force someone else's data into the public domain, if they were mixing the data without permission, they would be violating the licenses and legal action could force them to fix that (but it wouldn't directly change the licensing of any of the data)
The OSM fan in me thinks that eventually Google Maps will be based on OSM. :)
Google never had any real super high quality detail in my tiny home town. When I first got into OSM, I did what lots of people do: I filled in a bunch of details I know about where I grew up. Kind of fun. Well a month or so later, I checked out Google maps and, lo and behold, their data was much better for that little town. It was NOT the OSM edits I made--they didn't steal anything. But I found it odd that they'd all of a sudden take interest in a little town of less than 1500 people in the middle of nowhere. I don't know. It could have been a coincidence--It's possible they had a big world-wide map update during that month that updated everything.
Oh, and it RAISES the question, not "begs" the question.
It's more self-explanatory, for one, and is less misused in the vernacular.
[0] http://open.mapquest.com/ [1] Well, check the terms at http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/open/map
EDIT: That said, I have great luck with using something like OSMAnd+ to have offline sets of data that I'd contributed to. It works very nicely for electronic mapping of MTB trails.
Most people think that Google Maps is based only on camera-equipped vehicles and satellite imagery. In fact, the service relies heavily on crowdsourcing.
People who live in remote regions can use Google Maps' community tools to describe how roads, trails, etc., have changed. For example, when the post office in my small town moved, I edited Google Maps to reflect that change. You can also change the position of roads, trails and other geographic elements.
Millions of people regularly improve Google Maps because doing so makes it easier for them to commute and find local resources.
The lesson was clear: you contribute to proprietary databases at your great peril. People access Google Maps at the whim of Google. They could decide tomorrow to deny access, and you'd have no say in the matter.
So, contribute to Open Street Maps instead!
On one hand, we're a community of people who found and contribute to software businesses. Most of these companies depend on selling intellectual property in the form of code and data.
Yet, as makers or hackers, some of us despise the companies that attempt to profit from selling I.P. We expect that all components of software be free for us to tinker with and repurpose.
"Well...wait a minute," one might say, "There doesn't have to be a dichotomy between totally closed and totally open."
Exactly! That's precisely what Google is trying to achieve with its mapping initiative. The firm is investing heavily in community tools (not to mention SDKs for developers) that give us an opportunity to participate: posting, querying and modifying data.
Being both entrepreneurs and makers, we should be a little more realistic about our relationship with IP. You can't always have your cake and eat it, too.
(I can totally see submitting a change to get rid of an annoyance; I don't get warm fuzzies from 'helping Google make maps a better product'.)
Why not? We can always demand more, and what is wrong with that? And if we set out to make and eat that cake, chances are we can do it. It is not unrealistic at all. So far crowdsourcing has worked really well for many projects, and I can only see it getting bigger as we as a community realize the potential of open data and our ability to collect & manage it in numbers that few companies can afford to challenge.
The point made by GP is a perfectly valid one, and many of us have been screwed in some way or another by corporations that hold the keys. I do not see why playing along with such schemes has anything to do with being realistic.
If I despised Google, or any company that profits from selling IP, I would have said so.
If you can either contribute to an open dataset or a closed one, you contribute to the open one because the benefit no longer relies on the goodwill of any dataset owner. This principle underlies not only Open Street Maps, but OSS in general, and with a little finagling, things like Bitcoin. If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that we cannot rely on the basic decency of any institution.
I'm not happy about it. I wish I could trust institutions to be decent. But time and again they act indecently, and weather the (short) media storm, and keep going, business as usual, and we must protect ourselves from that. To do otherwise is to ignore the lessons of the past.
>That's precisely what Google is trying to achieve with its mapping initiative. The firm is investing heavily in community tools (not to mention SDKs for developers) that give us an opportunity to participate: posting, querying and modifying data.
So is OpenStreetMap, Navteq(commercial again) [2] and other mapping companies. Atleast Navteq/Nokia allows you to download complete offlline maps for their Here maps on supported devices unlike Google which wants to force people to be online for tracking/advertising purposes.
[1] http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/
[2] https://mapreporter.navteq.com/#dashboard
[3] http://blog.dynamoo.com/2013/10/google-ads-and-fff7ed-whats-...
OSM, along with its cousins-in-spirit projects Wikipedia and Libre Software are not about hacking on software. They are about building a society.
A society where no one has to depend on someone else. A society where everyone can learn and share with its co-citizens.
The number one foundation for building this society is that data be:
* accessible without needing explicit authorization,
* modifiable without needing explicit authorization,
* shareable with anyone without needing explicit authorization
in short, what the Free Software definition [0] does for software, but generalized to knowledge (for Wikipedia) or geographical position (for OSM).
By using and (worse !) contributing to Google Maps, you don't build this society. You trust Google to do it; but that's not the reason why Google exists, so you can't be sure about that. Plus, if you recall not-so-old history, you must remember how easy it is for Google to unplug applications even if they are used.
Google is giving you great, shiny toys to play with. But you can only build the present with them. I'd rather trust the future in a Foundation than in a company whose goal is to make money.
Such missions have a strong tendency to end in failure, death, or both.
How about a less grandiose goal like "making software better and more accessible"
You could draw a parallel with ecology. 50 years ago, no one would care about the environment; resources were basically free, pollution was seen as "minor". A world were everyone cared about the planet was seen as utopian. After half a decade of fights, the minds have now switched to a different mind (at least in the western world): pretty much every single piece of electronic hardware you can buy has some notion of "we-are-green" to it. While it's not 100% eco-friendly (just take a look at how electronics are "recycled"), people's mind certainly have changed. The guys behind the Libre software movement certainly don't expect anything big happening in the next 10 years (remember that RMS has been fighting for the last 30 years), but things will change, you can be sure of it. Just take a look at the recent plans to to "take control back" on the internet infrastructures initiated by Europe and Brazil. Sure, technically the things will more or less remain the same; but the mindset is changing, and it will keep spreading.
> How about a less grandiose goal like "making software better and more accessible"
This is a really noble goal in itself, and Google can be praised as one of the biggest enablers in this field, seeing how much they have changed the domain. While I may not sound like it, I actually thank them for all they did to the tech world, and the end-users in general (with an extraordinary amount of stuff available as OSS). Actually, that goal is more or less what OSS tries to achieve, except that the target is not the end user but the developer: the goal is to make sure that developers don't reinvent the wheel again and again and again.
But that goal is orthogonal to what the Libre movement (FSF, OSM, Wikipedia) fights for. That goal can very well be accomplished with private companies: in the majority of cases, they help society by building better and more accessible "things", because that's a sure way to make money (with the notable exception of US telcos), and money is what they're here for. But that doesn't mean you are independent; it's quite the contrary in fact, because their tool is so easy and powerful to use that you just use them. This is what many people call a walled garden: you can live in a complete ecosystem, where everything works perfectly together... but once you start wandering around, you quickly realize that there are boundaries to what you can do [0]. The tech world is even worse than this description, because everything can change in 10 years; you can't expect all your belongings to remain accessible at the end of your lifetime.
The FSF doesn't want to build better software. There even was a post recently mocking their logos. They want to build software so that you don't need to depend on anyone else. If you don't depend on anyone else, you can do whatever you want.
[0] http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/i-dont-want-to-be-part-of-yo...
For example, I wanted to use google in a commercial application, but only for backend services like geocoding and place search. I wanted to pay them for these services, but they refused the business because I did not want to display the data on a google map and use the google js api.
That is the sort of thing a company with lots of leverage can do. I wanted to pay full price or more to use a feature (10s of thousands per year), but due to a monopoly on the data, they can turn me away. Sorry, but I already have to deal with one Comcast.
Why should we trust Google with this data? Why should we supply google with this data when open alternatives exist? Will their incentives in using this data always be aligned with ours? You don't have to despise Google or want all things to be totally open to ask these questions. You don't have to be hostile to IP or companies selling IP to decide it is more in your interest to contribute to an open project.
I'd rather contribute data to an open project and watch a thousand mapping projects bloom (including Google's) based on that data, than help a corporation like Google or Apple take over every corner of our digital lives. OSM has led to a lot of great mapping services based on their data, and no-one resents those.
It'd be wonderful to see a similar open web search project based on open data too.
Being both entrepreneurs and makers, we should be a little more realistic about our relationship with IP. You can't always have your cake and eat it, too.
With large corporations, the cake is a lie.
It seems a little strange because I'd assume mapping Vienna, one of the world's more well known cities, would be of high importance. I wonder if they're now avoiding Austria on purpose, simply to send a message.
Edit: It looks like the ban was lifted in 2011. Three years later, and there's still no street view in Austria. I'm scratching my head on this one.
A little perspective is nice.
(That said, a3_nm's post indicates that this case had more to do with Google's collection of private data over WiFi than the photographs themselves. It's hypocritical for governments in the age of Snowden to criticize a private company for doing that, but at least it's understandable.)
I do not live in Austria, but, in my opinion, this does not seem an entirely unreasonable reaction to that discovery. (Incidentally, I think I would be in favor of laws controlling the massive untargeted acquisition of information in public space, for privacy reasons... and I would not mind at all if this meant there was no Street view coverage in my country; quite the contrary.)
If I was a shady business, you can imagine how I can mark all the roads in front of competitor as closed. Or I can mark the streets in such a way that traffic gets routed to go in front of my business.
Most of the edits that I have made have been for areas where I'm interested in walking paths, because I use the Maps API quite a lot, but going out of my way to map a city or something, I'd rather do that on OSM where it's free for all.
Google created something great with google maps. But I'll always feel like it's there to be consumed, not to be part of.
Google's web-based tool is much slower, and the dependency-chain approval process can make what should be a quick edit into a multi-day process. [1]
One example is a local park's hiking trails which are closed to cycling traffic. I'm do a lot of local biking and regularly use Google Maps to plot routes, so when I saw that the hiking trails had been somehow marked as cycling routes (which Google was directing people along!) I went to change them. Two hours later and I still wasn't done with simply unflagging two square miles of hiking trails.
Had this been in a JOSM-like interface it'd be 15 minutes at most, including committing the change back.
I understand that Google doesn't want to make changing things too easy, lest there be all manner of vandalism and personal-motive edits, but it's currently hard enough that those of us serious about making substantive changes have the tools getting in our way.
your OSM url : 48.2509 x 16.2533
your GM url : 48.256541 x 16.269420
The real issue is geocoding and business listings. That's the primary user interface to getting your mapping endpoints for most people, and frankly, Google Maps is far and above most other services in this regard. Street View is indispensable for many tasks. I often use it to get a visual cue of the place I'm looking for, especially if it's a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, or to map out where I'm going to park if it's in a city.
What it lacks is a service that extracts the data, makes it searchable and has ratings etc.
The UK is maybe the best case for OSM, unsurprisingly since it started there and has the most concentrated community there. There is barely any stone unmapped in the country, and stones that move get updated within days. France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are also very well covered.
See: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Piste_Maps
And something from the area you posted: http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/216074683
It has the huge ski areas in the Alps - I noticed the new "Vertical Experience" run at Meribel in the 3V which I'll need to add to the To Do list.
Read that again. If you make a classifieds website but charge businesses to list, it's a violation of the free Maps API TOS and you need to purchase an Enterprise license. Enterprise licenses start at 5 figures/annum for low-volume usage.
This is not some abstract ideological nitpick. Google has ramped up its attempts to monetize Maps ever since they introduced quotas a couple years back, and they are actively pursuing businesses to force them to buy an Enterprise license. So there is a very real risk that you could be targeted if you embed Google Maps, especially if your website gets big. This is no doubt one reason why companies like Foursquare, Craigslist, etc. use OpenStreetMap rather than Google Maps.
"10.1.2 Restrictions against Commercial Use.
(a) No Fees. You must not charge users or any other third party any fee for the use of the Maps API Implementation, the Service, or the Content, except as permitted under Section 9.1.2"
For his listings website that charged business owners fees for "premium" listings, Google[0] considered the embedded Maps to be part of what he was selling. They argued that the service as a whole (incl. maps) was "the product".
We disagree, apparently, but our interpretation doesn't mean diddly squat until push comes to shove.
[0] Edit: by "Google", I mean whatever sales drone is trying to get you to pay. I assume their salespeople are on commission like any other company.
With one important difference: they're the most arrogant, uninterested and rude sales people i've ever had to deal with. "Because, what are you going to do, use Bing?"
C'mon OSM. Can't get rid of google fast enough.
If so... would like to get in touch - maybe you can help my friend out by putting that sales drone in line.
I work on the Google Maps API team. I am not a lawyer, but my reading of the terms does not equate with yours.
Here's the excerpt:
(a) Free Access (No Fees). Your Maps API Implementation must
be generally accessible to users without charge and must
not require a fee-based subscription or other fee-based
restricted access. This rule applies to Your Content
and any other content in your Maps API Implementation,
whether Your Content or the other content is in
existence now or is added later.
OSM maps can be for any area, and applications do provide search, including POI search and routing.
Then the question is what does one do with all the extra space in this portable world device? Wikipedia information? Languages? Fun times.
That even includes a bunch of POI data from wikipedia.
On the other hand, as a for instance, that total includes more data for Germany than for Africa.
I guess some map providers might be pulling in other data sources, but in a lot of areas, OSM data doesn't have many POIs to find.
(the minimal effort way to improve this is to drop an anonymous note on the map, using the not very prominent button at the bottom of the right panel: https://www.openstreetmap.org/ )
I ask because I've been using Google Maps to travel and those features have been invaluable. An offline map is usually missing those features. The schedules are not up to date and searching by context requires data not usually part of map data.
Actually, where I live it's OSM which has excellent bike paths and Google Maps which hasn't (posted an example above).
And yes, of course it has bus routes and can route using car mode, walking, bike, public transit. Using applications like Osmand you can do much more complex queries than Google Maps, optimize by time, by length, prefer means of transportation X, etc.
Of course every offline app potentially has the stale data problem, but for me, it's actually OSM with the better data.
YMMV.
In many parts of the world, basic mapping data is incomplete, and one tool will have fresher data than the other for cherry picked examles. In another 10 years, we can imagine that mapping will all be relatively similar, and integration is what we'll compare against.
Unreasonable, yes, I know - but something worth sharing I thought, since if you get into the realm of "transportation data" it's kinda gotta be all-or-nothing, I think.
> Does it have bus routes, train schedules?
It has the routes, but no it does not have train schedules. Why? Because OpenStreetMap is just a basic map. It is not supposed to have such information. Someone has to write an app that uses the OSM data and then add the schedules.
For example: http://fahrinfo.vbb.de/bin/help.exe/dn?L=vs_mobilitymap&tpl=... (enable checkboxes on the right) - OSM Map Data combined with data from the transport assoziation
Btw. I guess you are from the US? Because good luck finding those schedules in Google Maps outside the US. Germany for example only has trains. No Buse and Tram data.
This might be of interest to you http://openmtbmap.org/
Yep. It even has a cycle specific map view (go to openstreetmap.org, and select Cycle Map from the Layers on the right hand side).
Bus & train scheduled, not so much, since companies don't release that that often.
That's why I love open source or hackable products. You don't need to whining to a shitty support forum to grind a kpi driven product manager to make empty promises.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ulmon.andr...
Due to the offline deficiencies, the terrible user experience regression from Maps 6.x->7.x, etc, I find myself using Google Maps less and less to the point where I'm not even sure my next phone will be Android based (until recently Google Maps/Nav was the killer app for Android for me, now I barely enjoy using that app at all).
This is good enough to use as a paper map (a zoomable paper map, with GPS and starred locations). HOWEVER, there are some huge shortcomings: No offline search, no offline navigation, and in certain regions, it's not available. I'm not sure exactly what countries are off-limits, but since I'm also backpacking through SE asia, I can tell you now that all of Singapore and Vietnam are downloadable, but at least some parts of Thailand and Indonesia are blocked. While this feature is incredibly useful, it's limitations are making the switch to OSM tempting.
OSM has definite holes in the data, but that's fixable, yet also suffers from a too much information by default situation for their standard representations. The map data is there, but the resulting maps just aren't quite as good, though I'm sure someone will use it to get there.
> utterly infuriating changes in the Google Maps interfaces
(Not for any important reason, just for a more concrete point of reference)
Personally I like maps that have a lot of data on them, but I can see why people might find it a bit overwhelming.
For a fully featured Android map app, with many options for map sources, try Locus.
EDIT: There is also no longer a way to know what areas you have cached.
- I have the new Google Maps UI forced on me. The slow loading one that's un-intuitive.
- I'm no longer allowed to see a "satellite view" of my city. I'm forced to use "3D view" or normal map view.
- They removed the underlined text and increased the font in Google Search for me. Making the text harder to read.
- Forcing me to use Google+ to comment on YouTube videos.
- Redesigning Analytics so it looks like garbage and I can't open multiple sites in new tabs.
There's no better time to compete with Google. At this rate they'll piss all their users away.
There are some very beautiful and functional geo-related products out there, and OSM works amazingly well in all of them.
That would be a very useful app! I love hyper local app ideas.
Lots of people have asked me for a good Houston tunnel app as I seem to be the 'tech guy' amongst our circle.
iOS or Android? I could help publicise this app and help beta test if you like? I'm iOS only but have access to borrow an android phone if need be.
How are you handling movement and position checking with no GPS ping? Wifi location?
Both iOS and Android. I'd love beta testers, you can get a hold of me through my bio.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osm2pgsql
It sets up and imports OSM data into a postGIS-enabled PostgreSQL database. From there you can use TileMill to create whatever type of map you fancy or just access the raw data.
I've tried Google Maps' latest version and it feels laggy; When I zoom in it seems to jump to an image at the end of the animation. Nobody is getting vector maps right except for Apple. I wish it could just use OSM for the data.
Bonus points if the app can download maps.
Google clearly know how to make their data support features they want in apps. They have been known to use computer vision techniques to read street signs in order to work out the logic of junctions, just so that they can do better route finding.
OpenStreetMap on the other hand focuses on just having a huge amount of data. Their online editing is much more discoverable, and as a result their data is often better. There's someone at my university who has an interest in it, and consequently, the main campus is modelled perfectly down to the level of individual trees being correctly placed.
I understand OpenStreetMap is crowdsourced but there are commercial vendors such as MapBox that rely on that data. I couldn't use those resellers either unless they had other sources of address data.
We've tried countless solutions but hadn't found any satisfying one until now. We cannot (and will not) use Google's geocoder becuse we wont put the information on a google map (part of their TOS).
We recently tried decarta and seems to be working really really good! http://decarta.com/ Unfortunately some house numbers are missing, but still, the quality is pretty high!
(I dont have any affiliation with them, we're just a customer now.)
Also, I would like to bash yahoo placefinder! It's realatively decent in finding addresses, but, but, but! The pricing is very high, the documentation ludicrous, customer service/forums nonexistent and you'll get terrible uptime, from now once a day or two, you'll just get mysterious 503 for which the official answer seems to be wait for a while, and hopefully it will fix itself, Just effing great!
We had to go with the business license approach because of the TOS involved.
BTW, MapQuest does have a "Community License" which unfortunately for us was using data from OpenStreetMaps and not the data behind its commercial product.
Basically, Google Maps works better than OpenStreetMap from what I've seen (I tried using OSM, but it was hard to tell what things were being clustered and what not).
I'm surprised at how quickly people advocating for OSM make the comparisons to Google maps. The user facing stuff at openstreetmap.org isn't comparable to maps.google.com or the various Google apps.
But OpenStreetMap isn't just the tiles you see at osm.org, it is a data product that you can adapt to whatever you need, for the simple price of attribution. And while the data is not complete, the global coverage is increasingly reasonable.
Open GMaps, enter the same address, it instantly displays it plus on the left, a Street View of the building front, and links for three crucially useful things that OSM doesn't appear to have: Directions, Search nearby, and Save to [my] maps. I use all three of these features heavily when planning a trip.
Bottom line: they may have the map data (the Bergen data looks pretty much the same, modulo the different graphic styles) but they lack a lot in the features built on it.
That said, its extremely difficult to do really good maps over a wide area. Having seen, from the inside, some of the stuff Google went through to get the 'truth' about what is on the ground, and continues to do, its quite an intense undertaking.
Last time I tried OSM, I had a very bad experience, but looking at Locus (as recommended elsewhere in this thread) things are definitely looking better.
Apple is using OSM data from before the change to the new licence if theirs is from 2010. Google could do the same, but what would be the point?
The tile rendering seems a bit slow, but it isn't super visually busy.
http://hikebikemap.de/?zoom=14&lat=41.84557&lon=-72.00125&la...
I wouldn't call that giant. It does take a moment for the higher zoom to render in, so the blurry lower zoom is there.
edit:(Not sure my tone will come across well, I don't mean to split hairs, I just see a relatively thin line for the trail)
Any company could setup their own osm-based map and include a layer with aerial images (which they would need to buy).
To follow the OSM crowdsourcing model, we'd need some way to gather ~street level pictures and reconstruct[1] vertical views, limited of course, no roofs etc, but better than nothing.
[1] think microsoft research project : Photosynth
Now what could be done is crowdfunding an imaging run by a satellite imaging company, and licensing the data under an open license.
I wish for drone imaging too, but automated cars aren't legal, and I think drones won't be for even longer (unless Amazon unlesh some nice lobby-fu).
About crowdfunding satellite licensing.. I just remember a lot of people are sending high altitude balloons, maybe that would be a cheap middle ground.
Want to work on an autonomous dirigible project? I'm up for it. We could build a home made Argus for image collection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
"The three principal components of the ARGUS-IS are a 1.8 Gigapixels video system plus two processing subsystems, one in the air and the other located on the ground.[17] The sensor uses four lenses and 368 cell phone cameras, 5 megapixels each.[18]"
I might just be more patient than you, but I spend more time waiting for imagery to come in from servers than I spend waiting for Josm (on a 5+ year old laptop with 2 GB or ram...).
I've tried josm a few times, it's completely unusable.
Do you think the style of interface presented by iD is more in the right direction? I don't mean the in-browser stuff, I mean the more simplified editing model and such.
(I'm not really trying to express an opinion on whether this is hoggish or not, just putting the numbers down)