
OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo - liotier
http://www.gisdoctor.com/site/2015/10/12/reasons-openstreetmap/
======
corndoge
I'm developing a transit mapping application for Android. OpenStreetMap in
place of the standard Google Maps components has been far easier, much more
hackable, more flexible, and overall much more fun to work with than Google's
MapView. As an added bonus the libraries for Android (OSMDroid in particular)
have total interop with the Google Maps API. It really has been a pleasure to
dev against.

I think OSM is an accomplishment on the significance level of Wikipedia and
I'm glad it exists.

~~~
lnanek2
Android developer here as well. Have found the same. It has saved the day
before where the only other option would have been licensing commercial
options like skobbler.

I don't think Google actually dog foods their Android Google Maps API, so it
tends to be pretty limited.

~~~
skimpycompiler
Google Maps is just too expensive and its pricing model isn't exponential at
all, it's not even quadratic.

Very common operation is looking for pairwise distance matrix. Pricing and
limits are totally irrational.

100,000 daily limit is totally impossible for an app with 10 users. 100x100 =
10,000 :D

Given that Google probably has all of the distances cached somewhere on their
servers, I see no technical reason why this limit can't easily be increased.
My app can have millions of shortest paths requests per day, and I certainly
do not have Google's infrastructure.

I get incomparable functionality using OSM.

~~~
jpatokal
You seem to be talking about the HTTP web service Distance Matrix API, but why
would you call that from an app? The JavaScript Distance Matrix API scales to
essentially unlimited users for free:

[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/distancematrix)

I'm also not aware of OSM offering anything comparable out of the box,
although there are some commercial providers who offers similar paid services
based on OSM data.

Also, if you think "all of the distances" are cached, I invite you to estimate
how many places there are in the world and how big a matrix of every distance
from every point to every other point would be.

(Disclaimer: Used to work on Geo at Google. Opinions mine only, etc.)

~~~
skimpycompiler
It's a mobile app primarily.

OSRM is a nice project - out of the box. The lead went to some giant - so
project is currently a bit stray but there are also some other alternatives on
github which work well but might not be as mature as OSRM.

Google caches insane amounts of things. What one might think is insane
algorithms, it's probably just Googles multimillion cluster memory.

Google is also lucky that no one needs the whole matrix, I'm sure that
distance matrix is insanely sparse and can be stored in not that large amount
of memory.

I understand completely that Google offers these APIs completely for free and
they can shut them down easily. I'm willing to pay for more but my quadratic
needs aren't met with root pricing.

So, to waste sub-linearly I can easily setup OSRM for my needs :D

~~~
jpatokal
Assume there are a billion places on Earth. (As there are ~7B people, each of
whom lives in a "place", this is already an underestimate.) If it takes a
single byte to store the distance between each of these places, you would need
an exabyte of storage just for this single byte.

~~~
skimpycompiler
You are really arguing that?

What system would calculate a shortest path between Sydney and London? There's
an incredible amount of sparseness in the matrix.

OSRM builts a hierarchy that allows fast computation of shortest paths for the
whole world map. It takes about 4 hours on my server, fills around 40GB of
RAM, and then after that I can magically do insane amounts of shortest path
queries.

Paper below has an even faster algorithm that has an operation of finding
shortest paths equivalent to just several reads in memory (according to
experimental results in the paper, it's roughly equal to 5 reads, meaning it's
just 5 times slower than that 1E18 table we'd have). It works on a single
workstation.

It might not be a pairwise cache but man, this is some advanced stuff and I'm
sure Google's engineers wouldn't think of having 1E18 elements matrix.

That's why I'm a bit surprised by the pricing and the limits. I guess network
traffic bandwidth costs.

[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1456...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=145689)

------
donquichotte
When I was traveling overland in central Asia, everybody I met was using
maps.me with OSM. The maps were of surprisingly good quality and maps.me is
superb, allowing the maps for whole countries to be downloaded (ideal if you
don't have a data plan) and the route calculation is quick as long as the road
grid isn't too dense.

~~~
mikekchar
I was amazed recently. About 3 years ago, my town in Japan had no maps on OSM
at all. I set about adding in the routes that I rode on my bicycle, but it was
pretty pathetic. I went to the UK for two years and when I came back somebody
had finished everything. All the public paths and everything are clearly
marked. I think the only thing left is to tag the stores.

The really nice thing about OSM is how easy it is to contribute. There is a
famous bicycle route that goes through my town, but it is also famous because
it is non-contiguous and completely unmarked on any map. The only way to find
it is to ride on the roads and follow the signs (some of which are hand
written by residents who live in the area). With OSM it was easy to mark the
part of the route that I knew about and now I see a lot of touring cyclists
coming through. It's incredibly empowering.

~~~
andygates
Tht old wiki magic :)

------
c0nsumer
I do a lot of mountain bike trail mapping work using OpenStreetMap, and it's
really bugged me that more public-service mapping projects (eg: MTB Project)
don't build on OSM. They all tend to instead build their own mapping set which
requires stuff to be re-entered... It's kind of a pain.

~~~
Brakenshire
Similarly, a lot of charitable organizations that could be releasing data to
build on top of the OSM dataset and the tooling that exists, instead create
their own data silos. For instance, Sustrans (the cycling charity in the UK),
and the Ramblers (the walking/hiking charity in the UK). I get the impression
that managers are coming up with ideas for their digital projects without any
reference to the technical landscape outside their organization.

I don't know whether there's anything which could be done to help these more
corporate charities get on board (for instance to make it easy for them to set
up and maintain an official database using OSM tooling, on the basis that the
data they gather is publicly available and licensed as open data).

~~~
jerknextdoor
I've been trying to learn the world of GIS for a cycling/pedestrian project
I've been working on over the last few months. I'm also working with the local
Open Data/Open Government groups. As I've gotten to know the communities I've
seen this over and over...even in the Open Data groups.

I've come to the conclusion that it's not malicious (or even 'Not Invented
Here' syndrome), but ignorance and a complete misunderstanding of the FOSS
world. It seems that a lot of the people and groups involved come from a
corporate background where they had to build and keep everything in house.
Whenever I mention not reinventing the wheel, building on others work,
collaborating with other groups, or opening up our the data I'm met with
mostly blank stares. (I could go on and on about this disconnect and why I
think it's happening, but it's not directly relevant to your comment.)

I think the major issue is that non-developers (and even some developers) have
no idea how to work with others. It isn't that they don't want to or are
refusing to, they fundamentally just don't know how to. The idea of working
with more than the fifteen people that are present in the room is mind-
boggling, let alone the idea of working with people all around they world they
may never meet. On top of that simple issue you have the same concerns you do
with any person outside the Open* communities: security, trust, liability,
etc. Have you ever seen a layperson look at a software/data license? It's
beyond overwhelming, so they all go back to whats safe, even if it's not the
right thing for their goals or the community as a whole.

To begin to remedy this I think we have a lot of work ahead of us...starting
with making the ideas and principles of Openness more accessible to those
outside our community.

TL;DR: I believe that silos are a symptom of being ignorant and/or overwhelmed
by the Open-anything world.

~~~
electricblue
GIS Manager here. The reason silos happen in the GIS world is because of
trust. Every organization has different priorities and standards when it comes
to data. The accuracy you need for your building footprints might be (and
probably is) unusable for someone else. Data sharing between entities is
common but even then oftentimes a great deal of finesse is needed to make
another organization's data work in your dataset. In the government sector
there is mistrust of data requests from those who would use data for
commercial interests so the default option is to charge for it or just make it
unavailable.

~~~
knz
Another challenge has been that GIS data is historically expensive to acquire.
As consumer grade spatial applications have become more popular there has been
a noticeable shift to release data for the common good rather than trying to
recover the cost of acquisition. Of course there are still plenty of silos out
there. The push towards regional datasets for public infrastructure also seems
to be gaining momentum but these projects often go nowhere unless they are
mandated by a Federal or State agency.

------
cossatot
I'm a big fan of OSM, but I have to say that for my purposes (more geological
than anthropocentric), QGIS becoming more functional over the past 5 years has
been more important, especially after going independent. Similar to Python
overtaking MATLAB in utility and likely eventual adoption, I think QGIS (esp.
with improving OSM/python/JS support) will become the new standard for GIS
outside of the mega-enterprise/private data world where ESRI is focusing.

It's really nice watching the confluence of open source technologies making a
bigger and more powerful wave.

~~~
Cyph0n
Yeah, I recently had to use some basic GIS to implement custom reverse
geocoding functionality for my college senior project. My workflow looked like
this:

\- Get map data from OSM

\- Use QGIS for analysis, feature extraction -> export as GeoJSON

\- Write GeoJSON to MongoDB instance

Geolocation "works" out of the box thanks to Mongo's geospatial queries and
the MongoDB client for Node. Overall, it was an extremely smooth experience,
and involved the use of open-source tools from start to finish. This would
have probably been impossible to do for free even just a few years back.

~~~
aw3c2
You might like
[https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/QuickOSM/](https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/QuickOSM/)

------
legulere
As a regular data contributor for Openstreetmap: Openstreetmap is terribly
broken in many many ways.

There's no regular checkup of the data if it's still valid. Reverting is
extremely hard and there are no checks for changing the data. The multipolygon
model for areas can be extremely complex and is the cause that many regions
aren't touched at all anymore. In many regions it's just an import desert
where already open data gets relicensed under the more restrictive OdBL
license. Those areas also only rarely get touched by mappers.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
That's harsh, but in the spirit of being constructive, here's a project for
someone reading this.

Let's take the first identified weakness: regular checkup of the data.

The easiest way to check this for highways is to run distance matrix
calculations. Take 500 points in a given area, and calculate a distance matrix
from them (OSRM makes this trivial: [https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-
backend/](https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/)). Store the result.

The next day, rerun the same matrix on the latest data. Compare the result
against yesterday. If anything has changed significantly, the data has either
been broken or improved. Flag this up so that it can be reviewed.

Repeat ad infinitum.

A really simple task for someone with the time and hardware, and it'd make a
big difference to OSM. I don't got the time myself, but am happy to
help/advise anyone who'd like to take it on.

~~~
ncd
Is there a specific place where I would go to flag things like this? Sounds
like an interesting little project to build.

~~~
maxerickson
I guess you would do something similar to this:

[http://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/](http://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/)

There isn't really a "central" place to flag such errors.

------
Kankuro
I contribute from time to time to OSM. What bothers me a bit is my
productivity when doing surveys with my phone and OSMTracker. The GPS is not
precise enough to record doors locations precisely, and taking photos is time
consuming (I feel quite productive when tracing roads against satellite views
using JOSM, though). I can imagine that Google's stack (with their Google cars
and adapted home-grown software) must be something like 100 or 1000 times more
productive.

Also, OpenStreetMap provides the data, but Google aggregates the data, which
makes very cheap to add/search a lot of information (ex: shops) available from
on-line sources (such as web sites). I don't expect OSM to have the same
amount of information any time soon.

~~~
IshKebab
There was a video Google made recently about some maps-related thing, and they
had a brief clip of the software their map curators use.

It looked extremely good. For example they automatically extract signs from
streetview and overlay them on the map. They also had a kind of fast
streetview fisheye thing. Hard to describe but it looked excellent.

------
maxxxxx
The only drawback I see with OSM that none of the apps I have tried has good
search capability. I would like to be able to enter "11077 Wilshire, Los
Angeles", instead I have to click through state. city and then street which is
tedious and sometimes impossible.

The maps themselves are very good.

~~~
schoen
What kind of work has been done publicly on a data model for resolving this
kind of query? I was just wondering about that because I was noticing a little
of how Google Maps responds in terms of different language names for places
and features.

Could this model be built automatically from existing OSM data, or would
someone else have to manually add some kind of additional hierarchy
information? Has this been studied from the computational linguistics side as
well as the geospatial information side?

~~~
XorNot
The short answer is yes: OSMand (note, not OSM - but a fairly popular
mapping/nav android app using its data) has users who build "full address
maps" for entire countries, but it has to be put together as a downloadable
bundle and mostly hasn't.

The other problem is OSM tends to have good street maps, but very limited
door-to-door coverage.

~~~
schoen
I'm just curious about how this works with some things that seem to add
complexity (I haven't worked in this area at all):

\- Different names for things in different parts of the address because of
different languages? (What if two different parts are in different language,
e.g. giving a Belgian city name in Flemish but the street name in French?
Giving a Swiss address with a street name in French, city name in German, and
canton name in French+? Giving a Russian address with the street name in
Russian but the city and oblast name in English, possibly using different
scripts?)

\- Landmarks and points of interest, maybe with separate colloquial and
official names? (Tower of St. Vincent? Torre de São Vincente? Torre de Belém?
Tower of Belém? Tower of Belem?)

\- How do you search if an address component is omitted (like leaving out a
city in a U.S. address but including a state or a postal code)?

\- How do you handle free-form text searches that might omit address
delimiters, or include postal codes in a locally nonstandard order, or omit or
include official postal designators for the components of the address (for
example, Brazilian addresses might include the word "CEP" before the postal
code but could be given without explicitly mentioning that the postal code is
a postal code)?

Is there a good book or web site or FAQ about geographic name matching that I
could look at to get a sense of what standard answers to these sorts of
questions are?

\+ In Switzerland, the same city could theoretically be referred to as
"Fribourg, [Staat ]Freiburg" or "Freiburg, [État de ]Fribourg". Well, of
course a human user might always search using _any_ combination of languages
with which they're familiar, or even ones they're not familiar with that they
just copied and pasted from somewhere.

~~~
kragen
OSM nominally assigns the "name" tag to the name locally used, and there are
also "name:en", "name:fr" tags, etc. Presumably you could search through all
of them, using an inverted index and a Bayesian prior for how likely words
like "CEP" are to occur in addresses. Bag-of-words should do just about
everything except distinguish ZIP codes from street numbers, and possibly
distinguish between street and city.

OsmAnd~'s interface for this is absolutely terrible.

A corpus of address searches to test against would be really helpful for this
kind of development.

I suspect there _is_ a good book or web site or FAQ about geographic name
matching, but you have to be a Googler to see it.

------
jusuchin
I recently used maps.me while in Europe (Germany and Poland), with no data
plan and only GPS on Airplane mode. With the downloaded maps, it was great. It
even included entertainment, restaurants and some transportation options.

~~~
freehunter
I was actually surprised recently to find out that GPS works in airplane mode.
Really fun to see what landmarks you're flying over when you see something
cool out the airplane window.

~~~
awqrre
Wi-Fi also does works in airplane mode, on Android at least...

~~~
jdmichal
Your phone is not in airplane mode if it's making any kind of signal. You're
just using Wi-Fi with the cellular modem disabled. Since GPS is only reading
the satellite signals, it works fine.

~~~
awqrre
Maybe not from a legal standpoint, but you can put your phone in airplane mode
and then re-activate Wi-Fi and it will still be in airplane mode... unless
they changed the behavior on newer Android OS

~~~
kevinnk
I was skeptical so I just attempted this on my Galaxy S5 and it turns out
you're right! Very interesting.

------
lallysingh
It is awesome. Here's a docker image that'll serve as a tile server. Add a JS
library (I use d3) and a OSM snapshot and go.

[https://github.com/geo-data/openstreetmap-tiles-
docker](https://github.com/geo-data/openstreetmap-tiles-docker)

Note: a bit finicky.

~~~
icewater0
I was going to post a comment how I would like to have a local instance of OSM
for my state/region.

Is it possible to calculate directions/routing locally too?

~~~
aidenn0
try out maps.me

------
ascorbic
OSM is great of course, but it's a bit of a stretch to say it's more important
in geo than GPS.

~~~
rcthompson
If I had to pick one or the other, I'd pick OSM. Given a map, I can figure out
my location, but the reverse is not true. (Of course, this is ignoring the
fact that a lot of OSM data is likely generated using GPS.)

~~~
andygates
Knowing where you are is truly disruptive. Having better maps is just having
better maps. GPS has been so incorporated into daily life that we don't
appreciate it any more.

------
meatysnapper
Google maps on the web and on mobile has become such a miserably bad
experience that I hope OSM wins big. Google's data is not bad, but the apps
are awful.

~~~
cthulhujr
Just noticed OSM has overhead power lines on their maps. A quick search
reveals GM either doesn't have that data or doesn't have any way of displaying
it. +1 for OSM in my book.

~~~
jarek
You can add just about anything on OSM
([http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:En_key_descripti...](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:En_key_descriptions)),
so the only limit is what people actually map :)

(and sometimes what the community decides, e.g. adding things that can't be
seen anymore, like old tram lines, is generally frowned upon in main OSM and
requested for something like Open Historical Map instead)

------
chromelyke
We've been navigating on top of OSM for about 18 months now (Scout in the US,
Scout/Skobbler in the EU/RoW) and it's pretty amazing how far it has come.

From a navigation standpoint the devil is in the details, like flow speeds and
turn restrictions, which is where we see the majority of our issues (flow
speeds significantly impact how you treat traffic and turn restrictions of
course impact routing).

------
oulipo
The only thing OSM is missing is a good open places database

~~~
vtcraghead
If this is what you're referring to, we're getting there:
[http://openaddresses.io/](http://openaddresses.io/)

~~~
reustle
Wow, they've really got Japan covered

~~~
maxerickson
OpenAddresses is a separate project from OSM that is aggregating publicly
available address data. Japan has a national entity that makes the data
available. The sources are all here:

[https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses](https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses)

~~~
mikekchar
Out of interest, people may not realize that Japan has a very different
addressing system than in the west. Streets do no generally have names (though
there are a few that do). Instead a city is divided up into areas. I won't try
to explain it (for fear of getting it wrong ;-) ):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system)

Often foreigners get confused and see things that look like street signs, but
which are actually signs for the chome (kind of a big block). They get very
confused when they see another such sign on a different street going in a
completely different direction :-)

Anyway, Japanese people generally don't put address numbers on their houses.
Instead they will put their name. So if you want to find an address for
someone you don't know (or a business) it is really hard. For businesses that
have to deliver things, it's really important to be able to find the address.
So the public database is really useful. These days everybody generally
navigates by GPS. You put the address in and the GPS unit will take you to the
right place. Most navigation units will even be able to navigate from a land
line phone number (as the phone numbers are pre-assigned to the address).

------
ancymon
From programmer's point of view working with OSM is quite annoying. OSM is
being considered more as database than drawn map. But that database is
inconsistent, contains many errors and its data structures are not good to
represent non geographical items. On top of that mechanical edits of map are
very discouraged. I think that OSM would only be good for simple stuff like
showing on your website where's your business located. Anything more advanced
like address searching or routing would never work reliably.

~~~
yellowbkpk
I think you'll find that there are plenty of companies making lots of money
selling services on top of OSM's "inconsistent" data. Mapbox sells an
extremely powerful map styling system, geocoding/searching, and routing.
Mapzen sells similar services. MapQuest offers services using OSM data. Apple
Maps uses OSM data in areas where commercial data isn't available.

I think you'll find that OSM is great for more than just simple stuff. In fact
using and contributing to it is a million dollar industry.

~~~
incanus77
Mapzen isn't selling anything.

~~~
yellowbkpk
True 'nuf. I suppose I meant "selling" in terms of promoting, not dollar
bills.

------
Bharath1234
We at hammerhead.io have been using OSM to its full potential. It is been very
helpful in navigation and tiles.

------
hodwik
I wish it didn't show Philadelphia as Trenton/Camden. That is so incorrect.

~~~
monknomo
I'm not being facetious, don't take it the wrong way, but you could fix it.
It's surprisingly easy.

I fixed a bunch of stuff wrong with my home town and found it pretty
gratifying

~~~
maxerickson
Prominence is hard to do automatically, so it may not be trivial to get the
system that renders the osm.org tiles to prefer Philadelphia (it does things
like look at population, but that data is present for Philadelphia).

~~~
monknomo
Very true!

I also took a look at it to figure out why it was showing up that way. They
look like they are the same magnitude of thing (city) and they both have
population. I'm wondering if it's actually showing Camden county?

~~~
maxerickson
No, it's not the county. I think what is happening is that the renderer
decides there is no room to draw the Philadelphia label once the New Jersey
label is in place.

------
awqrre
Somewhat unrelated, but any OpenWebSearch exist?

~~~
unimpressive
Sort of. If you wanted to make one you could probably get started with the
Common Crawl dataset:

[http://commoncrawl.org/](http://commoncrawl.org/)

------
andyl
IMHO Leaflet/OSM dev experience is so much better than Google maps - really
glad to have this option.

