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We’re 10 today

blog.openstreetmap.org

183 pointsVik1ng32 comments

A fun side-by-side comparison of OpenStreetMap in 2007 vs today:

https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#10/52.2644/5.2899

Besides a few city names, USA was completely missing in 2007?

Much of the progress came from importing the TIGER roads data.

I don't know it first hand, but the story is that other maps of the US were in pretty good shape and data was relatively available (either the TIGER data, or from states and counties), so interest wasn't very high.

OSM started in the UK.

I find OpenStreetMap to be the perfect example that it is very feasible to beat Goggle at one of its core competences.

Here's hoping for OpenStreetView and OpenAerials ;)

Mapillary [1] is a crowd-sourced Street View-like with a cc-by-sa license, but it’s far from being usable for now (not enough pictures).

[1]: http://www.mapillary.com/

Congrats, I am building a project around OSM, that's a bowl of fresh air compared to other platforms!

Weird, no party in SF or Austin? Finally, the "hypest" tech cities are the ones which are the less involved in OSM, that's a surprise!

Suprisingly OSM does not have a lot of users in USA for it's size. All data (incl. map data) from the US government is public domain, so the USA has access to a lot of free map data. But in Europe (specifically the UK), the government map data is heavily closed. Hence OSM was started in the UK.

But is that public domain data any good? Mappers in the US are still using MapRoulette to clean up Tiger imports etc.

I think it's also that many Europeans, especially Germans, are very sceptical of google while in the US google gets a lot of love, especially these days with fiber.

> But is that public domain data any good?

No not really. Some people think the import into OSM of TIGER data has hindered the creation of a US OSM community, because the map looks "good enough"/"looks done", when it in reality it's not.

There totally is a party in SF! http://www.meetup.com/Maptime-SF/events/199399492/

Thanks! This reminded me to look up the area I'm visiting today and see what I could do. Turns out there was a big old lake missing, so signed up and added it. Easy and fun!

I think the maps are very good but all Android maps I have tried that use OSM have terrible search interface.

In Google I can type in "IKEA Burbank" and get the right result. I can't do that in any of the OSM apps.

I also need to know in what city a certain street is. I can't do "1234 Foothill, Los Angeles" like in Google but I need to know that this number is in Glendale.

If they fixed this I think adoption would go up a lot.

I would like to know about OSM process for separating good contributions from bad ones. Similar non-map projects could benefit from learning how they did and how they do.

There isn't really a process at all. The barrier to entry is so high that those dedicated enough to map usually make it through with good intentions.

Mapping is really hard, and even with all the work we (OSM) have done to make it easier, we still get far less than 1 percent of our users to actively contribute.

It's not as widespread as Wikipedia yet, but OSM is one of the few community built resources to be used by everyone using computers.

I would like to see, some mobile OS bundle OpenSteetMap or a app which becomes a hit on top of OSM. The usablity of any map will be its data, and I feel OSM lacks compared to GMap or Bing map.

There are a few power users of OSM. Like, MapQuest and FourSquare. However, either of those have neither the detailed information of Google/Bing nor their popularity, so I see your point.

Not going into details, I was/am working on map related data. And still using OSM. And would love to see OSM take off.

From my experiences, OSM road/track data far surpasses Google Maps or Bing. What I find it lacks is good POI data, like restaurants, stores, etc.

Foursquare doesn't use OSM for places:

https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/venues

I guess Google is doing their own thing, Bing is listed as using Factual:

http://factual.com/

(Along with Yelp, Trulia, GroupOn, others).

Facebook is also in the business of having a landing page for every semi interesting place (I think this is one of the things that drove Google to push Google+ so hard).

There already are many apps based on data coming from OSM. The notorious Apple Maps takes some of its data in OSM. I've also heard good things about City Maps 2 Go [0] [1], which is also based on OSM data. I personnally use OSMAnd [3] on android, which has the benefit of being open source.

> I feel OSM lacks compared to GMap or Bing map.

OSM compares quite well to contenders when talking about raw geographical data. However, where GMap shines is locations: you can search a shop, a restaurant or a diving club on GMap and it will give you its position. OSM doesn't have this power, which is actually understandable given that OSM's goal is mostly geographical data.

[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/city-maps-2go-offline-map/id...

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ulmon.andr...

[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OsmAnd

There's no (or at least very little) resistance to adding POIs to OSM. In well mapped areas, the data in OSM can be a lot more accurate than the geocoded addresses that Google often shows you.

There's not really any great search interfaces for it (where part of great is limiting the results to 'nearby'). Komoot/Photon is a nice way to find something you know the name of:

http://photon.komoot.de/

And there are people working on displaying the data that is available:

http://osm24.eu/index.php#!15/52.5173/13.4032/type=eat/mon=p...

I don't know if it's a "hit", but Ulmon makes maps based on OSM data which are a great resource when traveling. Being usable offline is particularly awesome (and something we should be able to take for granted, but I digress).

Everything on a map is data. You probably mean labels and business names. For road networks etc I found OSM to beat other maps by a lot.

Also keep in mind that the way business can be added on Google Maps for example are all but foolproof.

Telenav employee here - we've been navigating exclusively on OSM since June for both iOS and Android (Scout Maps App). We also acquired Skobbler earlier in the year, which navigates using OSM if you're outside the US.

I've been wanting to look into the Scout/Skobbler SDK for a while now. I'll either be using that or Mapbox for some mobile/web apps. Do you have any insights to push me in your direction?

The points that differentiate us depend on your specific application. We have robust routing/turn by turn nav, offline maps, data visualization (heat maps) plus a whole bunch of other common features (custom styling, for example).

Definitely check out our dev site, which admittedly lacks some polish but is coming along (http://developer.skobbler.com/) and let me know if you'd like to talk to one of our SDK guys - they always want to talk to devs about their specific use cases.

If you're developing on iOS we've recently created a pod - http://cocoadocs.org/docsets/ScoutMaps-iOS-SDK/2.1.0/

Good luck!

Congrats and thanks to the developers of openstreetmap!

How do we make openseamaps.org better? OpenRov? Robots solar powered?

10 years! Congrats and thanks to all who made openstreetmaps possible.

Congrats!

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