

Porting 600k Map Views to OpenStreetMap/MapBox - erjiang
http://doublemap.github.io/blog/2014/04/29/porting-600k-map-views-to-openstreetmap/

======
Vik1ng
> The main feature that we can’t get anywhere else is Street View, something
> that nobody has come close to replicating.

Some people are working on it
[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapillary](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapillary)
;) (but yes right now not an alternative)

~~~
windsurfer
That application requires a TON of personal information, including:

* Full access to all my accounts, and ability to set passwords

* Read my entire USB storage

* Record all activity on my device

~~~
chippy
Not tried the app (it doesn't work on my phone) but you can upload images
taken externally if they have certain characteristics (exif gps etc)

------
chippy
>the main motivation was simply cost. Google doesn’t publish its enterprise
maps pricing, but it’s orders of magnitude more expensive than MapBox.

~~~
magicalist
> _the main motivation was simply cost. Google doesn’t publish its enterprise
> maps pricing, but it’s orders of magnitude more expensive than MapBox._

hmm, something is weird there. It doesn't say how often the 600k hit their
site, but presumably that's per month ("We have hundreds of thousands of hits
per month"). Google Maps allows 25k map loads per day for free, which is
already 750k for a 30 day month.

Even if you allow for overages that would cost money, it still doesn't add up.
If you double that to 1.2 million per month, that's $12.50 a day, or $375 a
month, which is still under the $499 a month Mapbox "Premium" Plan[2] (which
only gets you 1 million loads per month).

And that's not even touching enterprise pricing, which presumably has a
discount for volume (it's really dumb that gogole doesn't publish those
enterprise prices though).

[1]
[https://developers.google.com/maps/usagelimits/](https://developers.google.com/maps/usagelimits/)

[2] [https://www.mapbox.com/plans/](https://www.mapbox.com/plans/)

~~~
maxerickson
If you want to do something that isn't covered in the free usage license, you
have to pay before you are hitting the usage limits.

~~~
magicalist
OK? There's nothing here that isn't covered by the free usage license. Check
out [http://tufts.doublemap.com/map/](http://tufts.doublemap.com/map/) for
instance. Looking through the code, it's all pretty standard stuff.

------
krick
Not really on-topic (and pretty unconstructive, admittedly), but I wanted to
complain about OSM for a long time, so I'd better do it now (largely in hope
somebody explains me that I'm wrong and missed all the thing).

The OSM is _really_ important project. Like Wikipedia or GNU in the older
days, maybe even more. And like everything open-source, community-driven, it's
strongly dependent on how many people use it. Because, obviously, you are more
likely to be wishing to contribute if you are using it yourself and,
preferably, depend on your friends using it. And OSM is the kind of project
that pretty much everyone potentially could contribute to, because local
knowledge is invaluable for that kind of stuff. So caring for usability for
everyone should be the primary goal, I'd assume.

Yet OSM is kinda "b2b" in terms it's important for stuff like Foursquare
running, but is close to unusable for the common user without stuff like
MapBox, Foursquare and such. Because, really, what "common user" cares for?
Where to find café nearby, how far is it from point A to point B (usually in
some comparatively small area) and only very little information about the
whole world (like major cities, country borders). More importantly, whatever
information is there, he want's it to be usable and accessible. That is, being
fast to navigate, ability to make marks on your local device, accessible in
offline. Ideally, of course, you'd also want to have seamless integration
between offline and online modes, ability to share your local maps, there's
always something more to wish. So I feel that existence of good clients for
all platforms and ability to extract information you need for them easily
(without any self-education for that purpose at all, really) are absolutely
must-have.

Well, alright, we cannot expect somebody else working for free to provide
every single service we want after all. If you want something done, do it
yourself, right? It's how the open-source works, really. And that's the real
problem: documentation is horrible, both for "common users" and "power users"
(potential developers). There's quite impressive in sense of size wiki, but
it's totally awful in sense of usefulness. It's very hard to get going if you
are completely new to project and don't know anything about cartography.
There's basically only one thing I want to know when I find anything new: how
to use that thing. That is "Getting started" guide, followed by links to
"What's next?". OSM wiki has something called "Beginners' guide", but it must
be a joke, as the only thing it does is explaining how do I actually edit that
map, and that isn't really "using". (Again, if we don't think of it as b2b
only, which I explained why I think it's wrong.)

The same time there're articles on very wide range of topics, like existing
software clients or "Why open data is important". But you aren't guided to
stuff like that. And they are even worse. For example, why'd you care for
existing clients? Right, you want to find one for your device. There might be
several bests, sure, but neutral-point-of-view-style listing of a hundred of
them does only a little better than nothing at all. If you want to know what
you have to do (or know) in order to implement your own one — it's even worse.
The typical github project probably has better API overview than OSM (and
usually even includes some domain-specific knowledge you probably don't have
if you are new to the field, which is absolutely natural in case of
cartography).

If you want to see an example of good thematic wiki, look at ArchLinux wiki.

~~~
dima55
You could have spent this time improving the docs...

~~~
krick
Not really. If I thought I can you can be sure I would, because it's what I
usually do (and that's why I prefaced my post as being unconstructive).

But I can't for the several reasons. First off, I don't have enough domain
knowledge myself yet to improve the docs or even confidently develop for OSM.
And, _yes_ , I'm planning to correct this omission, but not even soon enough.

The second reason is, that b2b model I pointed out to be wrong in my opinion
is the very idea of OSM at this point. You can see claims quite often, that
stuff I mentioned isn't important, because OSM is _the data_ , not the
service. That's why I've written this post, explaining why I think ignoring
"the service" part is hurting "the data" part, in hope that somebody from OSM
community would read it.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
On the docs: there's a good project underway at learnosm.org to write proper
beginners' docs. As soon as they're ready for primetime they'll be linked from
osm.org (I believe there's a current issue for that), though they're not quite
there yet.

On the "b2b" thing: I think that's a mischaracterisation. It's not "to
business" specifically, it's to anyone who wants to make use of the data.
There are already OSM-powered consumer-grade mapping sites for particular
verticals (I run one for UK cyclists,
[http://cycle.travel/map](http://cycle.travel/map)) and more are on the way.

But it's not true that osm.org goes out of its way to avoid being a consumer
service. It may not be the prime focus (and nor should it be) but there's a
lot happening on the user-facing side of OSM: a significant redesign last
year, lots of stylesheet improvements underway, and routing going live in the
next couple of months, for example.

------
nutjob2
Is there any hard data as to the quality of Google Maps versus OSM?

~~~
dalek2point3
yes and no. In terms of street coverage, the general idea is that OSM is
pretty good (in large part because both Google and OSM source map data from
the US census) and both have active communities that improve that data.

Google is much better when it comes to both places and addresses, but
OpenStreetMap is improving rapidly and you can get great coverage in most big
cities. Also in theory you could source the POI data from some other place and
overlay that on top of OSM street data.

Google used to be much better in terms of ease of use, but with players like
MapBox that has changed dramatically. Its so pleasant these days to use OSM to
make a mapping product -- try out cartodb.com or mapbox.com just for kicks.

And the big plus of OSM of course is that you can pick and choose what data
you want to render, what you want to do with it (my fav new example is this
scooter routing engine that takes into account the hills in SF while routing
--> [https://www.mapbox.com/blog/launching-smart-
directions/](https://www.mapbox.com/blog/launching-smart-directions/))

As for "hard data" \-- here are a couple of studies that compare OSM with
private map providers

\- [http://eprints.nuim.ie/2476/](http://eprints.nuim.ie/2476/) \-
[http://www.spatial-
accuracy.org/system/files/img-X07133419_0...](http://www.spatial-
accuracy.org/system/files/img-X07133419_0.pdf)

~~~
erjiang
It also differs dramatically between regions, since the local governments may
have varying amounts of data publicly available.

For example, many cities in OSM have virtually perfect address geocoding
because some random person pestered their local government to openly release a
dump of addresses and their coordinates, whereas Google is just guessing at
house numbers.

~~~
aw3c2
OSM does not rely on imports that much, many cities have fantastic geocoding
potential because local mappers poured their sweat and local knowledge into
it. ;)

~~~
erjiang
I think you'll find that without a data import, address data tends to be
forgotten by many mappers. Compare Chicago, which did have a bulk data import,
with San Francisco, which did not. In Chicago, every house number and building
is mapped, but in SF you'd have to interpolate the numbers.

------
placeybordeaux
>[...] people using our real-time bus tracking to find out where there bus is.

their.

------
mrpanda
I don't seem to get the point of this post? Seems rather basic and trivial to
rewrite google maps code to fit in with another library like leaflet or
mapbox. What is something new or innovative done here? Also it seems like you
guys jacked a lot of what transloc does
[http://duke.transloc.com/](http://duke.transloc.com/)

If anything this seems like a weak attempt to garner some attention for
doublemap. I mean look at the link, its to github.io sure, but is there any
actual code. No. Then why not link to doublemap's blog? Why create this false
sense of open community (by linking to a github page) and sharing if you're
not really sharing anything. You're basically detailing what you did in text,
but in no way do you share your code.

~~~
incanus77
Yeah, seems simple. First, get a map of the entire world. Then, allow complete
customization of every detail of it. Then, serve it at cloud scale.

The point here is that "Google" is no longer synonymous with "map" and that
there is finally some choice in the space. This post by DoubleMap shows that
going with an alternative at scale is more than possible.

