
How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap - ephesee
https://theodi.org/article/how-are-facebook-apple-and-microsoft-contributing-to-openstreetmap/
======
orblivion
Seems like OSM has a future. This is great. Only sad thing is perhaps some day
we won't be able to have the fun of making contributions ourselves, if the big
companies handle all that for us like Google does. In the mean time, though, I
can make an easier case to people as to why they should care about this, since
it's now used by Apple and Pokémon Go.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Only sad thing is perhaps some day we won't be able to have the fun of
> making contributions ourselves, if the big companies handle all that for us
> like Google does.

There will always be room for individual contributions, because there are
things that the big corporations do not care about. For example, many hiking
trails and agricultural tracks good for cycling are missing from Google Maps
because they simply do not have a business case for those details. Yet they
are on OpenStreetMap because when OSM editors actually walk or cycle those
ways, they add them to OSM.

Another example is opening hours for shops. There are only three ways those
can end up on the map: 1) the business itself adds them, 2) a large
corporation is aware of them and adds them, or 3) an individual mapper copies
them off the sign at the shop’s entrance. For a lot of small shops, only 3 is
realistically going to happen.

~~~
matt4077
I'm pretty sure that Google Maps does auto-discovery of hiking and biking
trails by simply watching peoples' positions?

At least I've had rather good experiences using Maps for biking. Even small,
unofficial paths were mapped, and travel times indicated that Maps had an
accurate idea of their condition.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
With auto-discovery of routes, Google might be picking up the most popular
routes, but that does that does not mean they are the best ones. For example,
on Strava heatmaps you can frequently see routes that are heavily cycled, but
they might also be extremely stressful because one has to share the road with
traffic. In fact, most cyclists might only be using them because they are
sports cyclists with very thin tires unable to explore and find other options.
The great thing about OSM is that it only takes a single mapper to find a
nearby alternative and add it to the map.

> At least I've had rather good experiences using Maps for biking.

You wouldn’t in many countries around the world. Google Maps is considerably
inferior to OpenStreetMap for cycling in much of the Western Balkans, Africa,
and Patagonia.

~~~
matt4077
Funny you should mention Albania: It's exactly where I learned never to doubt
Google Maps.

Specifically, never to assume that "It's like ten meters between these two
points... I don't see a reason why we would need to go all the way around".

(There was a 30m deep gorge)

More to the point: Given enough position data, Google should be able to assess
all those road parameters you mention, far better than manual entry could ever
do at scale. They could easily notice, as but one example, when locals
routinely take different routes than they would suggest and modify their data
accordingly.

~~~
notriddle
Shouldn't matter if Microsoft and Apple are both collecting the same telemetry
and feeding it into OSM.

------
rmc
Yahoo (remember them?) allowed OSMers to use their aerial imagery from 2007
till 2011. Microsoft has allowed OSMers to use Bing aerial since 2010, and to
be honest, it's probably been the most beneficial contribution to OSM of the
ones in the article.

Also, Apple gave a talk at SotM about "working with the community" and
demanded that that talk not be recorded (unlike all other talks thre) or
shared with anyone else. Hardly in keeping with the spirit of "openness".

Facebook's computer vision imports are of dubious use.

~~~
dingaling
Indeed the Bing imagery is one of the greatest non-financial gifts ever given
by a technology company, regardless of motives.

When I started working on OSM about a decade ago my area was a greenish blur
on the photo underlay and everything had to be manually positioned from GPX
tracks. It took hours to map a street and given GPS error margins it was never
certain to be exact.

Now anyone can log-in and start tracing roads / paths / buildings and it just
takes a couple of physical visits to backfill the enumeration and names.

------
mariushn
Feel free to install on Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapswithme...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapswithme.maps.pro)

or
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand.plu...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand.plus)

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
even better...don't need to use Google Play:
[https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/)

~~~
lucideer
also, the gp's first link (MAPS.ME) is available on FDroid as an open source
fork with ads & blobs removed:
[https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/)

It also comes with some nice extra features added, but ymmv on the stability
of those features

~~~
Markoff
last time i checked you could not login with your account and update maps, is
it fixed?

------
hetspookjee
For anyone interested in setting up their own OSM tile server + Nominatim
geocoding: Here's an up to date docker image that is relatively easy to set
up: [https://github.com/drwitter/osm-tiles-
docker](https://github.com/drwitter/osm-tiles-docker)

Great for maps in offline environments and/or querying without API limits!

Really think OSM is great.

------
jaakl
There is also some controversy around it : the big players do data mixing from
different sources, which is not strictly compliant with OSM licenses. Also
some say that their bulk editing creates nice map data, but harms local
potential mapping communities, with early case of Netherlands where AND
contributed map data resulted to no real manual map updates afterwards. So
some say that community, not map must come first, so the “guerilla mapping” is
bad.

~~~
lucideer
> _There is also some controversy around it_

Do you have a link to some commentary on this?

I'm aware of MS's generated US building footprints[0] but this hasn't (yet)
been integrated into OSM (largely I think due to quality and bulk-import
etiquette worries). And also StreetSide[1] but this isn't imported into OSM
itself, rather it's displayed as an aid for editors.

Facebook is looking at contributions similar to MS's US building footprints
(but for roads), but again this is mainly around tooling and generation rather
than data sources, and is speculative as far as I've seen.

[0]
[https://github.com/Microsoft/USBuildingFootprints](https://github.com/Microsoft/USBuildingFootprints)

[1]
[https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/5050](https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/5050)

~~~
rmc
> _Do you have a link to some commentary on this?_

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:AI-
Assisted_Road_Tr...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:AI-
Assisted_Road_Tracing)
[https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57942](https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57942)
[https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=63456](https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=63456)
[https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57387](https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57387)

------
LukeWalsh
During a rotational program out of college I was the product manager at
Facebook working on maps as the team led up to the first ML contributions to
OpenStreetMap ([https://2016.stateofthemap.us/how-can-ai-help-us-make-
maps/](https://2016.stateofthemap.us/how-can-ai-help-us-make-maps/)). There's
an interesting story about a large mistake I made that is interesting to
share:

I started working on this project because I believe that map data should be
open as did everyone else on the team. There was (and still is to some extent)
a lot of skepticism about whether large corporations have the best interest of
the map at heart - and what tools need to be put in place to make sure the
quality stays high. It's pretty clear to me that there can be an alignment in
goals because whether it's a company, person, or nonprofit everyone prefers
accurate map data. The questions are about margins of error & OSM rightfully
leans toward only extremely high confidence.

One good thing about Facebook joining in on updating the open map is resources
are not much of an issue. Our team was able to just call up and purchase the
rights to the satellite images we needed instantly. For quite some time we had
working models that generated edits for roads that were missing from the map.
Leading up to the yearly conference there was a question of whether we should
present all of our findings to the community and see what they thought before
making any edits.

No one on the team was willing to push the button on submitting any of our
edits because we weren't sure if they were good enough and it would feel
shitty to be the one who broke the relationship between Facebook & OSM. Beyond
the software engineers even the people who were paid hourly to train the
models became invested in believing it was important that Facebook reach a way
to channel its massive resources into the project.

Eventually we all gathered up and I just pushed the button to contribute a
random 1km / 1km square in Egypt (we'd already computed edits across the
country accounting for over 100% increase but things could always get better).
Then we waited. No one ever reached out so we started contributing a little
more at a steady rate to see if anyone else working in the country noticed
(including improving the original 1km / 1km box as the models improved).

We were testing the ML in some of the harshest conditions we could find (low
contrast in the desert) so the research team started working on another model
for India (winding dirt roads, lots of rivers, tree cover). All of our edits
went through street-by-street human approval which was working but slow going
since the number of people on the project could fit in a Facebook friend
recommendation unit. After not receiving much contact in Egypt (the map
community there is small) we received initial positive feedback from local
mappers in India and decided to ramp up the speed of contributing which meant
getting a war room in Menlo Park and rounding up a larger group of people to
review the machine suggested roads.

I ended up gathering a few too many people and myself along with the core team
was too hasty in communicating the quality bar for submission. We planned to
shadow edits as the week went on to make sure the new members were up to speed
but things unfolded much more quickly. Within a few hours we accidentally
submitted a few bad roads. A local mapper noticed as he'd just driven the area
on his motorcycle the day before. I immediately left a meeting where we were
negotiating buying more satellite imagery and jumped on a bike back to the war
room. No harm done, we had scripts ready to undo edits.

When I got into the war room things were more problematic. Quite a few of the
new folks had made similar mistakes so we paused everything. There was now a
small group of local mappers in an IRC channel worried about large scale
vandalism (though they quickly realized that wasn't the case). They noticed
the breadth of the edits and tracked down the accounts of most everyone in the
room. The map community in India is one of the better communities but still a
room of this many people making edits at a such a scale was unlike anything
you'd normally expect since the ML made editing 10-100x faster than hand
tracing imagery.

During the time when the local mappers believed this might be intentional
vandalism they escalated to the global community. So that's how a large chunk
of the OSM leadership found out Facebook was doing work on the map - some of
our worst edits. Shit! It ended up not being so bad however. The entirety of
the bad edits were reverted in a few minutes with oversight from the head of
the OSM data working group. IMO the situation accidentally showed some of the
OSM corporate contribution skeptics that even the worst case wasn't so bad &
Facebook was definitely wanting the community in control of any crises.

It wasn't all thought through but it's quite interesting in retrospect how the
engagement strategy panned out.

~~~
stereo
Hi from the OSM data working group. Please don't do massive imports like this
without discussing them first with the local community, and the global one if
there's no significant local one.

The impact from the massive Facebook edit was more important, I think, and
people are still very skeptical about whether massive ML mapping like this can
provide value to OSM today. Announcing and discussing the edits first would
have been better PR. Recovering goodwill will take a lot of time and effort.

Our guidelines prohibit undiscussed edits like these, and not only the ones
that cause trouble. It is not respectful to the unpaid volunteers that cleaned
up after this that LukeWalsh seems to think it was "not […] so bad".

Please see:

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_Edits_code_of_...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_Edits_code_of_conduct)

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines)

------
andrewharvey
Uber [https://github.com/Uber-OSM/NewZealand](https://github.com/Uber-
OSM/NewZealand) plus many other smaller organisations have dedicated OSM teams
contributing too.

------
bepotts
Are Apple and Microsoft's map services built on OpenStreetMap? Or are they
just contributing for the heck of it?

~~~
lucideer
Not originally, though Microsoft have recently added an OSM layer to Bing, and
Apple have attributed OSM as being a contributor to their overall AppleMaps
dataset in some parts of the world.

------
mwexler
Maps are not just roads. POIS, transit rails, pedi paths all play a role,esp
in cities. And OSM does well with path data but it's POI data is disappointing
compared to Google. Transit stations are in the data but no info about what
lines serve them. For eateries or stores, hours, menu focus, parking data is
often part of Google POIs but is missing from OSM.

All great reasons this data is not present, but that does limit OSM usage in a
wide group of cases.

The data that is present, however, is wonderful.

~~~
seren
I do occasionally add opening hours to OSM but the interface is a bit clunky
in id editor.

I would recommend using Street Complete, that has a really easy interface to
add that kind of information to osm.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost.streetcomplete&hl=en)

It is in beta but still very useful, and does not feel like a beta (really
stable)

------
kerng
This is great! Google has recently spiked fees drastically and it will be good
to see more alternatives with high quality data

~~~
t0mislav
Because of that I needed to abandon Google Maps Api. But good thing is I
learned how to download OSM data, generate and host my own maps.

~~~
Moru
Yeah, me too :-) Just got it running yesterday on my devbox. Still thinking of
hireing Geofabrik to set up the real server when I'm done though.

------
lucideer
This is great, but I'm surprised to see Apple featured so prominently in the
title here alongside Facebook and Microsoft.

Apple has an internal volunteer programmer whereby employees can choose to
spend their time contributing to OSM—part of employee benefits (which is
nice), whereas Microsoft and Facebook are actually contributing mapping data
the company has created/collected to OSM.

Furthermore, just 2 of the 3 listed companies are major sponsors of OSM
events:
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_of_the_Map_2018#Sp...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_of_the_Map_2018#Sponsorship)

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
> just 2 of the 3 listed companies are major sponsors of OSM events

Don't assume that because a company isn't listed, it doesn't/hasn't
contributed.

~~~
lucideer
> _Don 't assume that because a company isn't listed, it doesn't/hasn't
> contributed._

That is the list of all sponsors for that particular event. Apple did speak at
the event, though their talk[0] was the only one not recorded, photos were
forbidden, and they uploaded no slides afterward. The topic was their
employees' volunteerism.

[0]
[https://2018.stateofthemap.org/2018/T081-Working_with_the_Co...](https://2018.stateofthemap.org/2018/T081-Working_with_the_Community/)

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Yes, I was there. You might remember from the Q&As afterwards that Apple is a
corporate member of OSMF but not listed as such, for example. The topic wasn’t
principally volunteering, though that was mentioned.

------
vanous
So OsmAnd and maps.me look great. Is there an Android app which i could run to
contribute traffic data flow and traffic events (accidents or obstacles on the
road) like Waze does?

~~~
konsnos
Someone mentioned it in the thread but I can't find who. There is
[https://openstreetcam.org](https://openstreetcam.org) that I haven't yet used
but intend to.

------
anderspitman
Is there anything OSM-based like gmaps with the ability to search for ie
restaurants in an area, then get voice navigation to the location? Even
something that lets you search for "McDonalds near this address" would
probably be good enough for me to switch.

~~~
maxerickson
Sure, but how useful they are will depend on whether the data in your area of
interest is decent or not.

OSMAnd and Maps.Me both have poi search and voice navigation.

------
xmichael999
They could use some money and hardware... Currently the site loads

This website is under heavy load (queue full) We're sorry, too many people are
accessing this website at the same time. We're working on this problem. Please
try again later.

------
tinus_hn
It is quite strange to see that many companies compiling essentially the same
dataset for themselves. If a proprietary map is not necessary for your
strategy it may well make more sense to go with OpenStreetMap.

------
amelius
I wish they contributed to DuckDuckGo as well. Or perhaps the issue is that
DuckDuckGo is not open-source?

~~~
detaro
Microsoft provides the search index for DDG in the form of Bing.

~~~
amelius
Interesting. I wonder in what format the index is provided. (Hopefully then
don't simply anonymize and forward user-searches to Bing).

------
yur3i__
I want to try openstreetmap, whats the best client available for android?
(Pref. f-droid)

~~~
hoschicz
MAPS.ME is the best one by a pretty fat margin, I'd say.

Map viewing is wonderful, the best I have experienced on Android. It's very
fast and super detailed.

Routing has some issues. The estimates are way off, routing by bike means road
bike (not MTB) and the voiceover speaks too early or too late.

------
ucaetano
This is competitive pressures at work, similarly to IBM and other's investment
in Linux in the early 2000's as a way to place competitive pressure on
MS/Windows.

If you're not the leader in the field, and won't be able to catch up just by
investing, you try to make the leadership in the field (Google's) irrelevant.

If the 2nd-best-by-small-margin base map info is open, having the best one
isn't a competitive advantage anymore.

~~~
nickysielicki
Second best? At least in my experience, OSM data is leaps and bounds better
than Google Maps in every way possible, and it has been that way for a couple
years now. The reason that I still use Google maps is that it's fast and well-
integrated with my phone, and it has a lot of added features on top of the
actual mapping that makes it very useful --- things like location sharing when
you're on a longer road trip, creating a notification on your phone to route
to an address from your browser, live traffic information, road closures, and
business reviews. In terms of the actual data, though, the details available
on OSM puts Google's data to shame.

I've been trying to get Google to fix an incorrect path drawn at a state park
that I frequent. I've submitted an alternative route twice now, but it's been
denied twice with little explanation. The path is a loop, but Google has it
missing half of the loop, off by an eighth of a mile or so, and has it drawn
where it cuts through private property. In contrast, OSM's data is completely
spot on with what my GPS shows.

The park is in a tourist area, and I go to this park often enough that I've
actually ran into multiple people visiting who have been standing on the trail
with Google Maps open on their phone, thinking they've made a wrong turn.

I've experienced the same thing at GNP in Montana, BWCA in Minnesota/Canada,
and all along the Richardson Highway in Alaska. If you're in a rural area or
on public land, OSM data is the best available --- even better than what a
ranger station would sell you.

~~~
fireattack
My problem with OSM, besides the lack of satellite layer, is that it doesn't
seem to offer any (detailed) info of landmarks - just the name, sometimes not
even that: for example, some churches are just marked with a cross.

~~~
orblivion
If you want to try something really fun, install OSMAnd and download the
Wikipedia maps, and then enable them I think in the "layers" option. I don't
even think that's OSM data, I think it's geocoded Wikipedia articles. They
show up on your map, and you can click on them and read them all offline.

~~~
orblivion
I was way wrong. It's under "Configure map" and then "POI Overlay...".

------
richforrester
Our HR department wouldn't let me give proper feedback. Even though I've had
some people that, with a little tweak to their knowledge, or a slight shift in
thinking, could become great hires.

There's tonnes of candidates out there that just lack something small, or are
slightly less ideal than someone else... yet still have all the raw talent and
potential in the world.

But you can't always hire them because you don't have the resources to up-
skill them efficiently. Or you need someone that can more readily contribute
to a project.

I've certainly got some people in mind whom I'd love to contact as soon as I
start at a different employer, to drag them on board if said employer had the
resources to properly develop them.

Ah well.

~~~
confounded
Wrong thread, perhaps.

~~~
richforrester
That's embarrassing.

