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Google Map Maker will be temporarily unavailable for editing

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70 pointschippy91 comments

If you love map editing and collaborating on better map data for the people, http://www.openstreetmap.org/ is available for editing. You can choose from a multitude of editors, your edits are live within minutes and everyone can benefit from your contributions. OSM is free and open, you can download it all, you can do whatever you want with it, you are not feeding a corporation that might or might not appreciate your sacrifice.

MapMaker was great for selfish reasons, though. My postcode had the wrong bounding box and some new roads were missing from it, MapMaker made it possible for me to get deliveries much more easily.

For the very same selfish reasons, I've made some OSM edits. Now I (and incidentally, everyone else) get better geocoding, better (foot+bike+car) routing, and a list of useful POIs :)

Also, in return for your contributions, all you get from Google is a single map rendering whereas Openstreetmap offers a multitude of them, the possibility of making your own and the whole source data that Google will never let you see but that you need for any sort of analytical processing or joining with other datasets !

For me, the big win in updating Google Maps is that it uses the updates when routing directions. So now walking directions use the walking paths in our complex, and our culdesac is properly shown as a one way loop rather than just ending in a point.

Same with OSM based routers, there are several websites and apps available. OSM is fantastic for walking and biking routing.

Yes but none of them have as powerful of a navigation system, nor do they usually account for traffic data which can be incredibly handy when deciding which route to take to head home from work or school during rush hour.

Mapquest I find is not very good though compared to Google Maps. Much harder to find a POI.

Certainly. But OSM allows you (or anyone else) to use their data, make a startup or non-profit to implement such functionality.

Google Maps, in contrast is a data silo. Even if you put data in by contributing it, it's Google's data. The possibilities to implement new ideas on top of it is very limited.

As others say, the stuff that people do with OSM is terrific. E.g. you have communities of mountainbikers who enter data about small paths, level of difficulty in the uphill/downhill direction, etc. You can extract a MTB-specific map out of it (which is exactly what openmtbmap does), which renders on your GPS such that all relevant information for mountainbiking is there, routing is adjusted such that you mainly use interesting paths, etc.

There are a gazillion other interesting applications that are not possible at all with proprietary maps such as Google maps.

Also, these days, the point of interest annotations are better than nearly any other map. Heck, in my area in Germany, even picnic tables, etc. are generally in there.

It really depends on how active your area is though. My area is very bare in OSM. While I've added some stuff to it, it is really too much for one person. It has gotten better I'll admit, but is still lacking.

I like OpenStreetMaps a lot, I just don't like the options for apps that are out there.

How do you mean powerful? Sure, traffic is hard to do, since you need real data. But if it's worse routing due to missing roads/paths, then you can improve the data.

As I'm driving somewhere Google can suggest me an alternate route if it sees that traffic is slow ahead and there is a faster route that opens up. Google takes into account construction that may be happening on streets and tries to avoid it if will slow my drive down.

Googles ETA's are more accurate and reliable. Googles directions seems to be a lot better taking me on more main streets rather than poorly maintained odd side roads.

I believe the traffic data has improved a lot when Google has acquired Waze - with such data collection network, of course they have great, realtime data (not complaining; just noting that building such thing takes more than just money).

My area does not have many people who use Waze. Not much of the data in my area would come from Waze. However they do take data from Android phones and apple phones with Google Maps and can use their locations to find roads that have a lot of people on them. This is great for giving everyone live traffic data. This is something that is hard to compete with.

See, most of the time when I am driving I know where I am going, but I want to know the fastest way there when it is busy. Sometimes an accident happens, or some event happened and it is just busy a specific way. I want to know that. OSM can't really help me there. Google maps does.

I like to Skydive as well; that is an almost 2 hour drive each way through busy Toronto, Ontario. It can get pretty busy around there. Google suggests me the fastest route there and reroutes if a faster route opens. My last drive there I saved 15 minutes just because Google maps directed me around a traffic jam. If I was using an OSM app I would have had to go right through that traffic jam and lost 15 minutes of time, and burned more gas.

I love OSM, and gladly contribute edits and gps traces to it, but I still can't use it as a primary navigation app until it can compete which it likely will never be able to.

I completely agree - there are some tasks (such as "collecting realtime, ephemeral data") for which volunteer efforts are less suited for than automated data collection (which requires significant upfront investment).

Yes that's what I figured. All of that is only possible if you have traffic (or can read the TMC for construction alerts). OSM is unable, now, to get that sort of traffic details, so can't route based on it.

This is exactly why I use Google Maps to edit. I've tried OSM apps on Android and while they are good, sometimes the directions given are not as smart as Google Maps and they don't account for traffic conditions which is rather unhelpful for me in most cases. Often times I don't even need the navigation directions home, I'm just essentially asking Google which way is the fastest route to take home given the current traffic conditions. Very useful when heading home from work or school during peak traffic hours.

Good point - OSM is not just this one map; I've now used it for offline (!) geocoding, online and offline (!) maps (shared tiles, customized tiles, own tiles, vectors), offline POI searches etc.

Most of this is not even possible with proprietary maps, let alone allowed (if you have nothing better to do, go take a look at Google Maps T&C, it forbids you many things - need a route on a device which can only display text? Sorry, no can do, either you must show a Google Map, or you can't use Google's routing).

http://hiking.waymarkedtrails.org/ is a quite impressive example for this. you may choose other layers in the right top!

Is there a FAQ somewhere on how to get started with the project as an amateur and mostly consumer of the data (but who would be willing to donate hiking, biking, and driving tracks)?

I'm assuming there must be an easier way of uploading GPS tracks than manually.

OSM beginners guide: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners%27_guide

Bing has allowed OSM to trace from their aerial imagery, so you can use that as well as uploading GPX traces.

Out of interest what measures are there in OSM to prevent people 'pranking' the system and entering duff data?

The same as on Wikipedia or any other collaborative "wiki"-like tool. There are active mappers in each area that look at changes that are being done there, we also have access to the complete edit history so we can see what changed when, where and by whom.

People do vandalize the data occasionally, or accidentally screw something up. That gets dealt with relatively quickly.

Although like Wikipedia the likelyhood of someone spotting bad edits is inversely proportional to how "busy" the area is, if you're going to add a new street to the center of Paris that's likely to be spotted much sooner than adding some fake country rode to the middle of Siberia.

Mostly it just works though because good actors outnumber bad actors by many orders of magnitude.

> The same as on Wikipedia or any other collaborative "wiki"-like tool.

But that's not unlike what Google has and that did not help :(

Only in the sense "all cars have four wheels, so a Indy 500 car is just like a dump truck". Google has "this will go through Our Glorious Administration and we might decide to look at it." In OSM, it is possible (and encouraged) to first contact the original mapper for clarification in good faith - much faster and more efficient.

An active community of equals and map enthusiasts, who feel like they are participating in and sharing in creating something for everyone.

Sounds just like Googles system to me...

No, Google employs people to verify the data.

I'm not a protectionist, but Google Maps has been damaging high quality local mapping services because of its zero price-point. It is technically the best mapping service, but when the data is wrong, it is very wrong, and, the bigger the problems, the tougher it is to get them fixed, even using Map Maker.

After 2000, South African local governments were restructured. New municipalities were created by amalgamating formerly separate towns. The boundaries of those defunct towns are visible on Google Maps (as they should be, as an aid to navigation, since the new municipalities are huge).

The problem is that the boundaries of these defunct amalgamated towns are totally wrong on Google Maps, especially in the cases of the City of Johannesburg, and Ekurhuleni Municipality. Suburbs like Emmmarentia and Parkhurst in Johannesburg are supposedly in Randburg according to Google Maps, and this leads to enormous confusion when looking up addresses. Similarly, the boundaries of Bedfordview in Ekurhuleni are wrong. Trying to fix these boundary issues is futile, because one has no idea what criteria are used in moderation, and it takes a very long time to do these fixes, only to risk having them rejected.

Google needs to invest more in Maps, rather than trying to get away on the cheap with half-baked crowdsourcing, and it needs to make sure that it responds to error reports quickly and transparently.

Three of four years ago GMaps used to display as open and operating a highway linking my city (Bucharest) to another city 40 miles away. The problem was that that highway was in no way open nor operating, as it was still under construction. I completed that "this-place-is-wrong"-form describing the issue and received a message back saying that bla-bla-bla the map is correct and I am wrong. That only increased my reliance on trusted paper maps from that day on.

This reminds me of a similar problem with wikipedia. A well known celebrity (Author I think) noticed that his birth date was incorrect. He tried to get it changed, even stating that he was the actual person and knows his own birthday - only to have it rejected as not from a good enough source!

> After 2000, South African local governments were restructured. New municipalities were created by amalgamating formerly separate towns. [..]

In France, administrative boundaries are updated in Openstreetmap about as fast as the government publishes them. Don't wait for Google !

OpenStreetMap is a free wiki map (which I'd say in some areas is a the better mapping service technically). You can update the map yourself, and it's shown immediatly. You can meet up and discuss with local mappers on how to map something. You don't need to wait for Google.

It's interesting to see how Google is consistently missing those local things. In Iceland http://en.ja.is/kort has way better satellite imagery and OSM has better maps. In Poland most transit data is missing from Google Maps and only available on local apps (e.g. Jakdojade.pl). People catch on sooner or later.

Maybe the way Microsoft is doing it really is the better one: give resources to OpenStreetMap and let them take care of the community work. Both sides win.

Does Microsoft use OSM data for anything?

They provide a lot of server resources by allowing OSM to reference Bing satellite/aerial imagery, but I've never seen any direct use of the data (they could certainly be using it ways that are not obvious).

I thought they sourced their map data in parts from OSM, and there is/was(?) a OSM map layer in Bing.

Even more important than the server resources probably is licensing the image data.

Famously they used the outlines of military areas, as mapped in OSM, to decide where to blur their satellite imagery...

> Does Microsoft use OSM data for anything?

Ensuring Google Maps has a compeditor?

This is probably one of the worst responses Google could take - who is going to enjoy waiting weeks/months for their change to be reviewed and added to a map when the whole point of community editing was to enable near-realtime changes to map observed by people living in the area? Throwing out the baby with the bath water. One prank and the whole community suffers beyond reasonable limits.

Probably the prank cost them too much. We don't know what happened behind the scenes. They might have just dodged a lawsuit.

If they allow unreviewed community edits to the map, why don't they also allow users to revert changes by others? This is how Wikipedia deals with vandalism at least.

Wikipedia's policy is radically open as far as these things go, and only works because a) they're willing to tolerate vandalism being public for short (and, sometimes, long) periods of time, and b) they have an insanely large dedicated army of volunteers maintaining it.

People with a bit of patience? It's really not that long to wait. And if it keeps childish acts such as this from happening, we're all the better for it.

Hopefully those mappers will move over to OSM where their changes are saved and shown within minutes.

Everyone is suggesting OSM here, but I am confused how OSM is any better at keeping out these kinds of spam based edits, especially if it is someone who has made a lot of edits? From what I have seen it would be open to the same kind of problem.

It's way faster at responding to incorrect edits (be they errors/mistakes/vandalism), in my experience. Spam etc. is unavoidable, as with any wiki-type project, but there are (well documented) mechanisms for dealing with it (as opposed to Google's "just drop us a note, and we might take a look, eventually, maybe").

Anecdote: I have tagged a street as "private access only" - and within hours, another mapper contacted me, asked if I took pedestrians into account (I didn't - the access restriction was actually for vehicles), and corrected my edit. Another time I have noticed that a street nearby changed type from "residential" to "secondary" (which does have real-life impacts, e.g. maximum allowed speed); checked IRL and with the mapper, and edited the map to better reflect the actual state.

Any edits I have made on Google Maps have also had the same kind of responses within a day or two. Sure you have to wait a little longer, that makes sense. It really depends on your area in Google Maps.

My neighbourhood is barely in OSM, and when editing it I wasn't seeing any other editors in that area.

Indeed, that's one place where OSM's community status becomes also its weakness: coverage is correlated to other mappers' activity.

As for the response - my point lies more with its openness: with GMaps, a correction disappears into a black box, and may be rejected for whatever reason (see the example with wrongly mapped highway somewhere in this thread). With OSM, the mapping criteria are documented, starting with "the map reflects what is out there" - specifically because even official data sources are buggy, and thus only deuterocanonical to meatspace.

Rarely have I ever seen something incorrect in Google Maps, and when I have I have made edits and the edit was approved in a timely manner, and soon after visible in Google Maps. You have to remember that Google Maps is used by A LOT more people than OSM.

> Any edits I have made on Google Maps have also had the same kind of responses within a day or two.

There's a big difference. In OSM you can change it immediatly. The few day turn around is for discussion the issue with the other mapper (since it's a community map). If the person didn't respond, you can change it straight away.

> My neighbourhood is barely in OSM

How lucky! Something to map! :) Round where I live, nearly everything is mapped, so there is nothing to do. You have a blank canvas to put your neighbourhood on the map!

OSM is full of local people mapping their area, and people care about the map (rather than helping out a big corporation).

You can still care about mapping an area and use Google Maps though. And I don't see the issue with helping a big corporation. They provide a free mapping service with realtime traffic data, satellite views, and more. I don't see how contributing back is so wrong. Why does it matter who made the software and runs it?

Yes, people's opinions aren't all the same. But some people feel less motivated to give free labour for the benefit of another company, and would rather work on something communal which everyone benefits from

That does make sense. I do contribute to OSM however. I am just stating that Google Maps navigation seems superior.

Maybe it doesn't matter to you - which is perfectly fine by me, I respect your choice. As for me, I've had "my" data (edits which I have contributed) in too many projects, only to have the "oh, and we're shutting the service down/restricting access/whatever, and no, you can't have the data, all ours!" happen to me.

I'm certainly not expecting Google Maps to go under, but I don't like the idea "sure, we will gladly take your data, but you can only do X, Y, and Z with them, and only as long as we're not angry at you." In other words, I have hit the limits of GMaps usefulness for my uses; I understand this doesn't necessarily happen to everyone :)

(Also related: in my geographic locations of interest, OSM is now a workable alternative - compared to five years ago, when I was struggling to fit within Google's terms, because there was no usable alternative for me then)

Don't get me wrong here, I do contribute to OSM, in fact I even contribute GPS traces. I do believe that OSM is great, I am just stating that there are some things that are holding me back from using it for navigation :(

It is indeed superior (due to the traffic data), and I also use it via Waze. It would be miraculous for OSM to be better than Google Maps in every aspect. I was referring to the "contributing to the map" aspect here.

OSM probably has a much larger community of editors. Both in absolute numbers and as a share of the users.

Because OSM is a community project, editors are more likely to feel responsible for map quality. On Map Maker, users also have limited possibilities once they find problems. I once tried to undo a malicious edit, and as far as I can remember my only options were to comment on it, and to "report a problem".

Do you have a stat for this? Map maker seems much more know and to have a rather large community based on the Google product page. If anything I'd think the community is much larger for the Google project than it is for OSM.

I was guessing.

The only user number I can find for Map Maker is 25000 in 2013, but there's no reference and it's not clear how many of those are active. http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-map-maker-vs-o...

OSM currently has 1% active and 2 million registered users: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats

So at least in relative numbers, OSM should have more contributors.

This was posted yesterday, too - previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519535

I think that http://tasks.hotosm.org/ has the balance of edit, review down pat.

More on the 'most recent incident': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9432504

Major strategic blunder: the whole world was updating their proprietary map data for them, but they failed to engineer the process to be spam-proof. Now they've had to stop accepting contributions as a result. Many contributors are likely to switch to updating someone else's map data, and Google risks no longer having the most up-to-date maps of the entire planet. Larry Page needs to kick some ass.

>they failed to engineer the process to be spam-proof

That's a bit naive. They have been getting business spam constantly from the day they opened. Like businesses marking their competitors as closed, or moving their own location so it is closer to their customers.

"Spam-proof" is, since the beginning of (unix)time, an ever-receding ideal, not a point that you could actually reach, or even reach and hold. I believe that in the continuum between "lots of spam, some data" and "no spam, but also no data" a point needs to be chosen (and re-chosen) which is "good enough." Shutting the whole thing down is IMNSHO not this point, and certainly an overreaction.

'This is why we can't have nice things'

Why, exactly?

Is it because Google asked for a bunch of free work to support its commercial interests without providing any oversight at all? And now they won't provide the resources to fix their problem?

Doesn't it seem likely that one of Google's goals here was just to compete with and thus extinguish existing free services? Is that why we can't have nice things?

I'm curious, now that you've mentioned it.

There's clearly evidence to support us not having nice things because of childish pranks.

Where's the evidence to support Google's goal was just to extinguish free services?

Do you have any links or anything to show what you mean?

I am pretty sure that was a baseless argument just to hate on Google.

Except that OpenStreetMap is a real wiki map and is producing a real map to rival Google Maps. We can have nice things, We have OSM

How awesome would it be if all the big players contributed their effort to one open source platform. Much like how WC3 works. Everyone would benefit from the work they do and they can instead compete on the features or the front end they provide to their users. If google moves their data to openstreetmap then everyone stays up to date including google.

The optimist in me says that this announcement is prelude to Google opening up their map data like you describe. Probably not, though.

OSM will eventually overtake Google Maps and others, so I predict GMaps will eventually use OSM.

Importing GMaps data into OSM would be a programming nightmare, and is basically never going to happen. Trying to merge those 2 databases! Yikes!

Programming would be the lesser of the nightmares involved: merging whatever n databases that Google has (licensed under something, only Google knows what), with ODbL-licensed OSM data would be the real nightmare. Opening closed data is always a pain.

Licencing can be solved by the correct person in authority signing a bit of paper. Merging millions of roads in OSM with millions in GMaps?

That's the programmers' equivalent of "any matter programming can be solved by a smart person typing on a computer for a little while, there's nothing to it."

That said, I do acknowledge that merging two global datasets would be a nightmare.

This is not a new problem. You just cant trust an individual, even with a long history. The solution is to have individuals check up on each other. If some users are interested in drawing, other users should be interested in moderating.

And then you end up with the interminable whining regarding the moderation - see Wikipedia, StackExchange, etc.

They can handle those using the classic google support pipeline. ie straigth to the garbage bin.

What humans do on the interwebs matches exactly what humans do in real life. I don't think there's a technical way to avoid that.

OSM has less whining, probably because there is often less amibugity. Someone on StackExchange might wonder if a question is really off-topic, but on OSM, there'll be very little disagreement about whether the thing is a lake or a postbox.

OSM is helped by the On The Ground Rule, in other words, physical world is the canonical source. There's quite enough disagreement in secondary tags (e.g. "smoothness" of a way), but having a universal canonical source (whatever is physically there) helps immensely with conflicts between data sources (sometimes from three data sources, you can get five data points, neither of which matches the physical feature ;)).

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes#On_the_Ground_R...

It was practically unavailable in my area anyway. I'd already grown tired of fixing some really bad errors on the maps surrounding my neighborhood and workplace only to have the fixes reverted by someone or something else.

I wonder how the edits could be pre-review by an image analysis tool, that will auto detect if the submitted path is a text or a logo. Might speed up the manual process.

The Android pissing on Apple was created step by step with shapes that by itself looked totally clean. This would not work.

Sort of. Here's their list of edits: http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=66&ptab=1&uid=200619129451... (should be page 3), the Apple at the bottom would be reasonable to expect a human to catch. Not so much for a logo seeking algorithm, but it's not a clean simple shape. On page 4 the android head stands out too, again a human moderating could be expected to spot that.

For the people who didn't know the related prank like me, which led to this result: here is a quick summary about it: http://techaeris.com/2015/04/24/google-android-mascot-shown-...

It is a welcome move if they are able to figure out a solution to retain quality. This problem exits more prominently in Google translate where people game the system and I guess that the translation is supposed to correct itself over a period of time with people fixing the mistake.

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