
Why the world needs OpenStreetMap (2014) - pwg
https://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2014/01/04/why-the-world-needs-openstreetmap/
======
eksemplar
I work in the public sector in Denmark and we use OSM for pretty much every
map routing project we do as google won’t agree to not track our usage or
protect our data under the privacy shield.

Gotta say OSM has been mostly amazing to work with, but there have been a few
quirks over the years. A few times the direction on one directional streets
have been wrong, and when I corrected it, using our GIS data as evidence, my
correction was denied because I had to physically go take a picture of the
street.

It felt a little silly being a municipality and having an OSM correction
denied by some hobbyist, especially because it was blocking functionality on a
piece of software used by 60.000 users.

Don’t get me wrong, I blame us for not getting a verified account on a
critical piece of software, but it still made me hate community driven
software for around two hours.

~~~
CamperBob2
_Gotta say OSM has been mostly amazing to work with, but there have been a few
quirks over the years. A few times the direction on one directional streets
have been wrong, and when I corrected it, using our GIS data as evidence, my
correction was denied because I had to physically go take a picture of the
street._

They have to guard against abuse, and they can't necessarily accept that
you're an authority on any particular location. It's easier if they demand the
same proof from everyone.

That said, demanding a photo of the location seems pretty stupid. If your goal
is to vandalize the OSM database, how hard can it be to Photoshop a few bogus
street signs?

~~~
rmc
OSM doesn't generally demand proof from people. I suspect the root cause was
avoiding copyright infringment, not abuse.

------
emacsen
Wow... How odd to log into Hacker News and see this.

I'm the author of the post back in 2014. The sad thing is that I'm midway
through writing a new post about why I feel OSM is failing.

I have largely stepped away from the project in the last two years. I still
believe strongly in OSM, and what it stands for, but I feel the project has
not lived up to what the public needs.

~~~
aluhut
I hope your post won't end up being so generalist as this comment is.

OSM is the best freely available map service in Germany. Many (if not all?)
local and national institutions use it as well as many private companies.

The mobile apps got really nice and are useful for normal users for different
purposes and all that for free.

There are even apps everybody can use to fill the data gaps like:
[https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete](https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete)

It needs some kind of pretty hard decadence (or corruption?) to ignore that
for such a broad generalization.

~~~
emacsen
> I hope your post won't end up being so generalist as this comment is.

If I was going to write a simple one sentence or one paragraph analysis of why
the project is not living up to its expectations, it would be easy and I would
be done.

Instead, I'm writing an in depth analysis of what I view as the impediments to
the project;s success, and it's taking me several weeks to write because it's
such a complex topic.

I need to explain not only the problems to seasoned OSMers, but also make my
arguments understandable and accessible to a wider audience who isn't familiar
with OSM internals.

It's also important to relaize that I'm not writing this from the same
position as so many newbies writing about OSM- they go to the website and say
"Oh this is ugly" or "This is confusing" then leave. I was very much part of
the project for quite a few years, in a number of roles.

------
TipVFL
OpenStreetMap is amazing.

Based on my research, most paid mapping services get expensive quickly with
any serious load, even if you're just geocoding addresses. Also, if you want
to do anything interesting with the data you're probably going to run afoul of
your license agreement that says you can't combine their mapping data with
data from other sources.

It opens up so many possibilities for small developers to create large scale
mapping services that would have been prohibitively expensive or otherwise
impossible. They also make it really easy to put together a quick proof-of-
concept by hosting their APIs on numerous public servers with generous usage
terms and no registration.

I'm working on a project right now that wouldn't be possible without OSM, for
multiple reasons, so I definitely agree with the article's premise.

------
afeezaziz
I am supporting OSM and have dedicated a team of three executives to do
updating for OSM.

Nevertheless, I have this burning question on how can we prevent people to
abuse OSM by making false edits intentionally. This is an important issue as a
lot of applications depend on OSM.

~~~
shirakawasuna
There's a lot of comparisons between Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, and I think
this one is valid: when Wikipedia first started out, its mission was to
populate new articles. As most topics became fleshed out, they transitioned to
having higher editorial standards (ignoring the various dramas for now) and
spending more time curating existing articles.

OpenStreetMap is in that 'early' phase: tons of edits are adding new data for
fundamental things: streets, houses, addresses, land uses. And it has a
barrier to entry - you have to be a tiny bit nerdy to confidently make edits.
But in the not-so-distant future, it will need to transition to more and more
maintenance and data quality tasks.

Personally, I think a good intermediate step will be to embed better and more
automated review processes. The simplest one is in use by companies/agencies
that use the data already:

1\. Take a snapshot of your region. Vet it for your use case and deploy.

2\. Grab a new snapshot at a later date (time to update the service). Look at
the changes - is anything wrong or popping out at you? If so, fix it, then
download + deploy.

If this becomes the primary means of adding data to OSM, a similar two-step
process could be embedded into the contribution mode: Add data, then get the
edit reviewed. Plus, there are automated tools to spot and characterize
changes already (e.g. QA tiles) and they'll only get better.

~~~
bhousel
> And it has a barrier to entry - you have to be a tiny bit nerdy to
> confidently make edits.

Serious question - what can we do to lower these barriers to entry? Friendlier
community norms? Documentation / tools? Social stuff (groups, meetups, etc?)

I'd love to hear people's experiences on contributing, and your honest
feedback. I'm one of the "core" members of OSM (I maintain the iD editor) and
we're always looking for ways to improve the new user experience.

> Personally, I think a good intermediate step will be to embed better and
> more automated review processes.

I agree! For now, most review is done manually by volunteers. We're looking
for ways to make this process more efficient.

If you haven't already, check out the OSMCha changeset review tool:
[https://osmcha.mapbox.com/](https://osmcha.mapbox.com/)

It runs some checks against every changeset as they occur, and presents a
newsfeed-style list for anybody to review. It also has filters, in case you
are interested only in certain geographic regions.

~~~
Tyrannosaur
I recently started mapping, and scaled the learning curve that surprised me
how high it is. I downloaded streetcomplete and Vespucci for my phone, but
when I came to a road (on my bike) that didn't exist on the map it wasn't
obvious to me how to add it (I still don't know how to do it on either app).

When I finally hopped on my desktop computer and did the iD tutorial, a lot of
things became much easier. I learned how to add roads and buildings, and
started doing so. Then I noticed that my map software (osmAnd) didn't announce
my freeway exits.

To figure out how to mark freeway exits properly was terrible. I found the
motorway wiki page and the motorway link page, but from those pages I didn't
feel like I could tag an exit properly still. When I finally found the
exit_info page things made a little more sense why they are confusing: there
are conflicting ways of doing it! I started tagging freeway exits near me.

One thing that would have been helpful for me (although would probably be a
bit of work to implement) would be more overview-level tools. Like "I want
to..." a) add a missing building, b) tag a freeway exit, c) give addresses to
these buildings, etc. Granted, some of this is already done. I suppose it's
really the exit tagging that is a new example.

I also have been worrying about my changes being erroneously modified by other
people, without a way to "take ownership" of an area and be notified of
changes- I will take a good look at that OSMCha change set tool.

------
dorfsmay
I used to use and contribute a lot to OMS, then affordable data plans
happened, and I realised that map is a small part of the issue, navigation is
a bigger deal, and where google has a huge advantage.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
That depends what part of the world you are in. There are places where OSM
coverage of local ways is superior to Google’s. It is hard for Google to
provide navigation through an area when it doesn’t even know about the streets
there.

------
m-p-3
Even as a casual user OpenStreetMap is great. My old Garmin GPS isn't
supported anymore and no up-to-date maps are available, but some awesome
persons online are providing updated maps that are compatible with it using
the OSM data.

Thanks OpenMapChest!

~~~
brightball
I’ll be checking that out

------
8bitsrule
After all of this time, OSM still has many glaring (maybe still necessary)
empty spots. Usually involving bodies of water. I could point to, for example,
thousands of square miles of lake country in the Canada map which are -empty-.
(I usually shrug and switch to Bing.)

I can only guess how their editing priorities are mapped out (is there a Wiki
or something?) but I'm guessing that's related to visitor numbers.

~~~
porjo
Openstreetmap depends on ordinary users adding/editing what they care about.
Why not have a go editing those areas yourself :)

------
jokoon
Getting OSM data exports is a little tedious.

They're available, but it's not so easy to get it since it's always very
exhaustive. They should try to review how they make data available for
developers, have different data sets, appropriate file formats, etc. They
should offers different level of exhaustiveness and type of maps. The most
basic should only contain roads and streets with their names.

OSM.org is great as a google maps alternative for users, but the problem lies
with how OSM lets it data being available. GIS systems are always sensitive to
size and performance, so it's not a simple problem.

MapBox seems to be on the rise, but I don't know what they're doing exactly,
and what is free or not.

I tried using their .mbtiles format once and failed, it is a combination of
zlib, sqlite and google protocol buffer. The generated C++ headers were the
most horrific thing I saw in my life. There are better alternative to google
pbf, I guess flatbuffers for example?

I have no idea how one would or should distribute map files properly. XML is
not indexed and very very large, mainstream databases are inadequate because
indexing geographic data is tricky so you cannot really select a specific zone
you want.

If I was openstreetmap, I would federate XML exports, and generate country
exports automatically, AND generate smaller exports for smaller country
regions. I don't know if a good alternative would be to provide slightly
overlapping squares, so planet.osm would be divided by 16 (or 32) squares, and
then each square 16 (or 32) times again.

Open platform only thrive if distribution is smooth, and for maps it's not
easy but it could be done. It's only a data problem.

EDIT:

I'm talking about exports simply because OSM.org servers might never be able
to hold XML API calls for every developer who wants to use it in their apps.

~~~
rmc
OSM.org does provide a "per minute" data feed
[https://planet.openstreetmap.org/replication/minute/](https://planet.openstreetmap.org/replication/minute/)

"basic map" with "roads and streets" is choosing one thing. What about country
names? Or city/town names? What about administrative borders? _which_ language
should be included? What about turn restrictions?

~~~
jokoon
Unicode can be used.

As in basic map I meant something the user can recognize easily enough, but
still more compact in data. If you want an user to navigate manually, this
kind of data is enough.

------
bjourne
I wonder how they deal with political topics. For example, searching on their
map for "Palestine" brings you to some village outside of Rennes, France.
Searching for "Israel" brings you to the state with that name.

~~~
maxerickson
By trying not to.

[https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerrito...](https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf)

Part of the explanation for your search is that local languages are given some
preference by that search engine. Searching in the US I get the city in Texas
as the first result.

Searching the Arabic فلسطين returns the country.

~~~
bjourne
Then why is ישראל (Israel) displayed in my browser when I hover over the
region but not فلسطين (Palestine)?

~~~
maxerickson
Whatever you are looking at is preferring one of the particular name tags on
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1473946](https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1473946)
or
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/424297647](https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/424297647)

Likely "name" on the node link.

(assuming the display you are looking at is getting the data from OSM anyway;
The default tiles on osm.org will use the "name" tag on nodes for most
rendered place names, other users might combine OSM data with other data
sources or whatever)

------
baby
I'm doing a "map" project and currently if you want to use something like
google map that is not openstreetmap you're going to have to pay a lot of
money for it (that is, if you get any views or customers)

------
senthilnayagam
OSM helped lower the barrier of entry into GIS for me and hope many of you
would agree.

I discovered routing OSRM, geojson, proprietary data formats, ETL, and lot
more on GitHub and blogs.

------
twblalock
Four years after this article was written, nobody has a "monopoly on place,"
no monopoly has take over mapping, and OpenStreetMap is still the least
convenient of many options.

At some point, vague appeals to freedom and decentralization need to be backed
by evidence.

~~~
emacsen
Sadly, as much of a critic of OSM that I've become, this analysis of the
situation is untrue.

Mapping companies simply consolidated, and Google began agressively mapping on
its own.

------
asldfjasl
As much as I like OSM, I had to switch back to Google Maps for two reasons:

1\. The library is better designed use out of the box 2\. The tile layer is
more professional to regular users

For 1, I just need something easy to use. Leaflet is great but you still need
more manual coding than google. Google's library is very intuitive. For a
feature, I will barely touch after implementing, I prefer Google's: less
learning the api, and gets the job done.

For 2, I know there is Mapbox, but they don't provide a tile layer similar to
Google or when tiled, some buildings are simply missing. I just want a Google-
styled tile layer. If someone could provide this, I will switch back.

~~~
Symbiote
Google's style and cartography is copyright, so it's not allowed to simply
copy it. They also change it every year or so, often to emphasise businesses
over things that don't pay.

You can use [https://OpenMapTiles.org](https://OpenMapTiles.org) to style your
own map with vector files generated from OSM data.

