A lot of people are misunderstanding the article in this thread.
I work with GIS data from multiple sources. Neither Google's APIs nor OSM nor Bing nor anything else is enough for applications with high specs. You need to mix machine learning and available sources.
Doing this is a PITA. Sources rarely match one another (e.g. an object will be referenced on both Bing and OSM, but 20 meters apart, with no way of accurately matching them in the middle of a dense city).
The article very clearly says that the goals include making the existing services interoperable, which would be a big advance for API customers. (This isn't about making a new Google Maps competitor, it's about a Google Maps _API_ competitor, though it will surely help build the former too.)
Just being able to download the same area from Bing and OSM and seeing "this house has ID 234 here and 234 here, that's the same building" would be great, because that lets you gather all the available information about it instead of having to choose one or use matching algorithms that can make mistakes. It can also remove false positives, which also happen.
I’ve been dealing with this recently and it’s a mojor headache, but the issue of things not lining up is primarily one of using coordinate systems correctly, knowing what things were measure in and what they are shown in
> but the issue of things not lining up is primarily one of using coordinate systems correctly, knowing what things were measure in and what they are shown in
Not in my experience. Two satellite/plane pictures from the same provider can be shifted by several meters. Buildings hand-drawn in OSM are rarely perfectly correct, and won't fit most images anyway due to the first point.
Conversions between coordinate systems are precise up to floating-point errors, that's the easy part and more or less solved by geo-referenced data formats.
Yes, but i’m finding, increasingly, that while we have the means to accurately record data, even accounting for float point errors by reducing area of coverage, things are simply not reported or cared about. It took us a considerable amount of investigation in using an rtk system to actually set things up correctly to get it to actually work within it’s 1cm accuracy. This is stuff like contacting rtk service providers to find out what system they actually correct their coordinates to.
To me, the greatest innovation any provider could do is just specifying the coordinate system used
EDIT: in fact i am finding it shocking, it’s even invoking government regulation, the simple fact is, even using advanced systems from leading suppliers, vital facts are just not recorded because geographic coordinates system are so numerous and complex suppliers just offer defaults and do the real work in the background
Even here, i hope you don’t misunderstand a geographic system as we talk about all coordination systems, as opposed to geographic vs projected coordinate systems
What data sources do you work with? I didn't know about RTK, it looks interesting but seems hardly applicable to satellite imagery, since it seems that you'd need a lot of receiving stations on the ground?
My understanding is that providers like Maxar report coordinate systems correctly, but that errors in ortho-rectification (due to imprecise or wrong terrain altitude data) make it hard to make two images of the same area match exactly.
> even using advanced systems from leading suppliers, vital facts are just not recorded because geographic coordinates system are so numerous and complex suppliers just offer defaults and do the real work in the background
Not sure I understand what you mean by this. Do you get data that reports a coordinate system different from the one it actually uses?
I mean, maybe it would help, but I've already learned the basics of how projections and coordinate systems work, and I can't make the link with GP's "vital facts are just not recorded because [...] suppliers just offer defaults and do the real work in the background."
I struggle to see why supporting OpenStreetMap wouldnt be a better course of action. OSM already has lots of good data; is the only valueadd redefining the format to be more enterprisey andor gatekeep some data? Hard to tell from their press release or really even the article.
If Overture Maps wants something that OSM doesn't want to provide, I'm quite happy that they don't try to force OSM in a different direction.
For example, OSM has data but doesn't really want to be serving map tiles to the entire world. There are companies that are quite happy to serve map tiles, but I assume that's not all they're looking for either.
The Global Entity Reference System looks quite interesting: if it's going to work well, it's going to have to bear at least a passing resemblance to Unicode in that it will need to capture all the different ways that existing systems refer to distinct entities. I can understand why OSM wouldn't want to build such a system, but I hope it would also be quite valuable to the OSM community.
OSM isn't the be-all and end-all of GIS data. It's very incomplete in places and doesn't always spatially match with Bing's data or other sources.
> is the only valueadd redefining the format to be more enterprisey andor gatekeep some data
I'd like to interpret that in the "strongest possible" way as HN's guidelines request, but I can't find one. This is the opposite of what the article says.
> Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.
> I know very little about the space, but couldn't Overture members focus primarily on just filling in those gaps?
That's not enough. OSM doesn't offer every kind of data you'd want about an area, it's sometimes not even remotely aligned to other databases or images, it needs to be compared to what other APIs provide to get a result with high quality. This project sounds like it's trying to make these things way easier.
> The map isn't the territory. Consistency with reality is what matters, not what Google says.
Absolutely not if you look at other applications than navigation services. This is _not_ only about Google Maps, it's about their API. See for example the elevation API [1], which gives you an altitude above sea level for any point on earth. This is meant to be combined with other data to build various services. Having alternatives to Google that use a standard format and are generally interoperable is great for developers.
>OSM doesn't offer every kind of data you'd want about an area
For various reasons, a neighbor and I were looking at some property data in both our town's and the MassGIS databases. Our town had info not in the public MassGIS database and both had more information than either OSM or Google Maps.
This was all public information and you can argue about how much should be readily available but it already is for anyone sophisticated enough to know where to look.
There is a lot of region-specific data that isn't in OSM. Governments (at national and regional level) often have records that have not been integrated into big services for example.
If this project could let all these services interoperate better, that would be a great advance.
"Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets."
https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/
Is this part of a new Embrace, Extend, Extinguish campaign? Legit question, at this point I trust the Linux Foundation as much as the corps behind it, but I'd appreciate being contradicted.
It's quite hard to contribute teledetected data in bulk to OSM. For instance we tried to contribute Africa forests back in 2016 and just gave up. Later I wanted to contribute my city's borders from an official source. We had a GEOJSON and ultimately had to draw it over that with the help of another contributor and fix all the data manually.
This doesn't look bad even though I don't trust Amazon, MS and Meta.
Does anyone find it troubling that the Linux foundation is being hijacked for tertiary interests that do not involve things in the operating systems/virtualization/containerization area but are simply concerns that some members of the Linux foundation have?
Linux Foundation employee here [0]. The value the Linux Foundation is providing the legal infrastructure for competitors to work together and stay clear of anti-trust problems. Every one of our meetings is supposed to start with this slide [1] or similar [2].
FYI you have a outdated view of the Linux Foundation, it truly hosts a variety of open source foundations involving open source + data these days... it can be more viewed as a professional "foundation as a service" organization: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/resources/publications/linux...
Aside from hosting projects under the Linux Foundation directly, LF (and OASIS, for example) also offer Foundation-as-a-Service for anybody who is ready to pay for a setup with a good (whatever that means to you) governance model. This is exactly what's happening here and I see no problem with that (unless your argument is that LF should not do Foundation-aaS at all).
When it comes to soliciting investor money, startups are often beset with questions about specific technologies the investors heard were "hot". E.g., "Everybody's talking about cloud these says. What's your story on cloud? How does cloud fit into your strategy?" Just substitute "crypto", "AI", etc. So the startup is forced to either hit the road looking for a VC interested in their product or incorporate cloud, crypto, AI, or whatever into their product.
I suspect that big-ticket donors come to foundations with similar questions, and substitute social issues like climate change, the gender wage gap, etc. "What are you doing about climate change? How is your foundation protecting LGBTQ rights?" So the foundation is put in the position of saying "Our primary mission is maintaining a critical piece of software" and refusing the donor's money, or incorporating the social issue into their mission. Because an awful lot of money could be at stake and the foundation needs money to keep the lights on.
I saw Linux, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, and I thought: one of these is not like the others. It's almost the opposite. What mutual interest can they possibly have?
Not really, besides maybe the name being a bit confusing. As far as I can see they're still doing great work supporting open software/knowledge projects.
You've already expanded the Linux Foundation to tertiary interests but don't see mapping as one of them? The very same foundation that created the NodeJS foundation?
Odd view on things frankly. This is the one thing the foundation does very well.
Linux foundation is already a corporate directed foundation.
They don't push or even care about Desktop linux for a reason, they are also extremely anti GPL, which funny because one of the biggest reasons for linux's success is the GPL, just look at BSD/freebsd and Apple, and compare that to Red hat and Linux.
I welcome this. Google simply has too much control over this area.
Case: I work for a small, family owned business. It does home remodeling. A large part of how the company generates leads is through the website and Google Business profile (or Google Maps listing).
The business currently ranks well, but there is a growing threat from marketing firms.
This is not a problem with competitors hiring marketing firms. It's marketing firms or solo marketing "gurus" who setup websites for each city in the metro area and a matching Google Business profile. These profiles are often setup through reaching out to local residents who'll accept Google's postcard verification for a new listing at their home address. In return for providing the marketer with the code, the resident gets a small fee.
Once the website and listing start ranking, the marketer tries to get local contractors to buy the leads from them.
This scheme is known as "rank and rent" in some circles (read: among shady marketers).
These actors add no value. It's for this reason that Google explicitly forbids this activity in its Google Business profile listings.
However, go about reporting such profiles, nothing happens.
I welcome a break of the monopoly so that Google and others will start taking more action on shady marketing tactics.
Or Google could hire humans to do tech support and address these kind of problems directly. But we know that Google's profitability is in part because they have dispensed with the idea that you can phone someone to report a problem and get a fix. But there could be a simpler human solution to this problem rather than a legal or technical one.
I worked at Microsoft 10 years ago and at the time Bing was still being pushed hard along with the new Windows phone.
The lack of geospatial was a major painpoint for both products but confusingly it's one they decided to not invest in.
I heard directly from the VP in charge of it why: open source maps were going to make Google maps irrelevant. We saw it with encarta and wikipedia he told me. Once the open source community gets its hands on something it becomes impossible to compete with.
A decade later Google maps still has no real competition.
Seems like that vp misunderstood the complexities to build and maintain the product and the utility people expect. Wikipedia is text of historical events. All it take is someone sitting at your computer to maintain it.
Commuting has many components beyond get me from a to b. Those also have to be maintained, and actually require that people sometimes physically visit a place to confirm it still even exists. Not to mention all the photographic information necessary to support the product.
Yeah but will they charter planes with cameras and build software to process all that imagery? Drive cars around to take street level pictures, detect and blur faces? Somehow get indoor and underground mall maps? Pay armies of data cleanup ops people to make manual adjustments? Process phone location data to infer traffic conditions?
I think it's a very commendable effort but I'm not sure it can be accomplished with a collaborative potluck approach vs a very strategic investment with clear accountability.
The partner structure makes sense, I guess this will be the result:
- TomTom provides their mapping data (they already have fleets of cars, planes, people and relations to city planners, as well as live data for traffic conditions. They get some sort of monetization back as the market for navigation devices has all but collapsed over the last decade.
- AWS and Microsoft provide cloud services
- Microsoft and Meta bring reach to the new platform - MS has O365 Outlook and Meta with all their services that use maps integration
- Meta brings in a huge list of POI data and attendance information because almost all businesses still have (validated) Facebook pages with coordinates, and the Facebook app is notorious for being a data vacuum
- Linux Foundation coordinates dealing with FOSS projects, particularly OSM and desktop environments - the other companies aren't really the best in thinking in the same way as for-profit corporation
In the end, everyone brings in something valuable to the service, and gets something in return.
Didn't know about Amazon MapsAPI... jesus, they're adding new stuff to AWS every few days or what. How can anyone keep up with that is a mystery to me, and I'm managing a couple thousand AWS resources in Terraform at work.
> - Meta brings in a huge list of POI data and attendance information because almost all businesses still have (validated) Facebook pages with coordinates, and the Facebook app is notorious for being a data vacuum
They could also steal the user's pics instead of driving cars filming streets around! /s
I recently saw a post on an android site about alternatives to google maps and since I'm going to be driving over the holidays I have tried out a couple. They may or may not give better directions but the voice nav on both of the ones I tried was terribly robotic compared to google maps' voice.
One of them even had the default that it made an alert every time you were above the speed limit. So in town when I would be varying between just above and just below the speed limit depending on the flow of traffic, the stupid app would be beeping constantly. For the first time ever I was hoping for a red light so I could have a moment to find the setting to turn that off.
I’m all for more map competition with Google, but I’m wary of what it means for correcting rural/suburban addresses.
I have a friend whose address didn’t properly exist in OSM, which resulted in packages regularly being undeliverable from Amazon and the like. I helped submit a change that mostly fixed the delivery issue. However, it’s been years and the change has never propagated to Bing, and my direct change requests to MS have been ignored.
As another example, someone/someapp decided that the road I live on should be Mystreet Dr. instead of just Mystreet. Now I run into all kinds of ‘this address looks incorrect!’ validation errors when I use the correct name. Even worse, the municipal legislation to change my street name missed some procedural steps. So, some maps, including my car’s nag, have it as Oldstreetname. This may be technically correct, but no one calls it or knows it to be Oldstreetname and Oldstreetname is definitely not on any road signs. I also have no idea what data source my car’s nav is using, so U don’t know how to correct it.
> I helped submit a change that mostly fixed the delivery issue. However, it’s been years and the change has never propagated to Bing
Note that Bing has their own database and doesn't just repackage OSM.
Keeping accurate and up-to-date addresses for the whole world is impossible to do manually. I think initiatives like the one described here can make it easier to correlate multiple sources and fix this kind of errors.
Exhausted with people abusing and misusing the word monopoly. A monopoly and having market dominance are not the same thing. Google has put far more effort into Google Maps than Microsoft ever has into Bing Maps.
Effort has nothing to do with it. I don't see anything about effort in the FTC's definition of monopoly. [1]
"Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors."
I think the issue is less whether they're a monopoly in a legal sense, as much as if these companies really have a leg to stand on to complain about it. "We all decided to not really make a product in area X, and someone else did, so they're bad."
There's a case for the government or the market to want to have competition for Google Maps, but for 3-4 companies who all went "Eh, just let Google have a monopoly. Competing is too much work." to turn around and complain about it feels a bit rich. It's not like Apple and Google complaining about smartphone OSes, or Linux complaining about Microsoft or Apple.
> "Eh, just let Google have a monopoly. Competing is too much work."
You're acting like it's somehow cowardly not to take on one of the most powerful and infinitely-resourced companies on Earth in an area that they would be happy to lose money on.
And without that competition, google has no real reason to improve maps, and no reason not to degrade maps in support of their other products (if a strategy to do that occurs to them.)
The reason people aren't competing with maps is because they don't want to flush money down the toilet.
I'm saying it's cowardly to aggressively half-ass your "competition" and then act like you're being bullied by someone who now has a monopoly because they cared more about making a product than you did.
It's a bit rich to claim that Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft were cowed by Google being too resourced and willing to run things at a loss when that's essentially how they built their entire businesses too in the modern era. If it was just OSM or some small dev complaining about Google, then sure, but this is 3 of the biggest, most well funded, most willing to do things that lose money companies in the world complaining that another of them had better planning than them.
I'm not in any way arguing that Google Maps isn't a monopoly, or that someone other than OSM would have been wise to compete with them over the last 10 years, (although Apple has been, and notably doesn't seem to be a part of this).
This feels more like all these companies going "damn, we kinda just expected the OSS community would do all of the work for us to beat Google". Clearly Google Maps is providing value for Google now, even if it's peripheral value for interoperability and improving Search and other services. This just feels like all of these companies going "Wait, Google was right. Accurate geospacial data is valuable to a business even if we're not directly selling it as a product." That feels like something where it's a bit rich to complain about it being a monopoly when you didn't have the foresight to see that it would be valuable.
I mention effort because Microsoft hasn't even tried to put a real attempt into competing with Google on maps before claiming a monopoly. Tried nothing and completely out of ideas must be an impenetrable monopoly. To compare it with the FTC's definition, Microsoft and Facebook are not excluded from competing with Google Maps. You can make a maps app and put it on Android today.
I hate to break it to everyone, but "dominance" does not equal "profits." How do I know this?
I was in Google Patent Litigation, and there were tons of suits against Maps. In all of these, the plaintiff strains as hard as they can to find some connection to Ads, because that's where the money is. Maps doesn't bring in much money.
I'm not going to quote figures here. In some countries, they were paying someone per search for data, because they didn't have their own map data yet. Maybe that's changed.
"Oh, but imputed revenue!" you say? Well, no one has ever succeeded in defining that and proving it. You can be certain that Google won't ever do it, even internally, because that would end up in Discovery.
> since Google's rise to mapping dominance, it has put the screws to developers with anti-competitive terms and rising prices. In 2018, Google Maps hiked the price by more than 1,400 percent, and many developers were forced to stop using Google Maps or go bankrupt.
> The US Justice Department began an investigation of Google Maps earlier in the year over concerns about car app bundling and anti-competitive terms of service.
>When Uber held its IPO in 2019, the company reportedly paid $58 million for Google Maps API access over the previous three years, and that was mostly before the Google Maps price hike.
I think things have changed since that suit. Let's see if the gov can do something.
My data is from around 2014. "since Google's rise to mapping dominance" is risible. It's had dominance since the early 2000's.
I'm not in touch with the Litigation team and if I were, they certainly wouldn't tell me, but I'd be surprised if plaintiffs have stopped going after the Ads money. I'd bet that still dwarfs whatever pittance Maps brings in.
Surely there's some synergistic benefit? I would hardly use a search engine these days unless relevant searches pulled up a map (not to mention the associated restaurant reviews etc).
I didn't read anything indicating they will contribute back to OSM only that they will siphon off all the work and data done by OSM contributors to date; ultimately aiding Microsoft with another EEE demolition.
Google's Maps API isn't an open standard, this isn't extending the Maps API, Gates doesn't run Microsoft, people don't owe you free contributions of their work.
It sounds like OSM doesn’t want to do some of the stuff Overture wants to do like serve up map tiles and whatever.
And the opposite, can’t imagine they would want to maintain the location of every tree and cow path like OSM does.
It’s been shown many times an open source commodification is able to break a virtual monopoly your competition holds. How many times has google done this over the years?
Title is a bit misleading. This is about the API, which is used by various third parties like ride-sharing apps, and which are probably annoyed at how expensive Google made the Maps API.
I agree. It’s been my default for years now, and I don’t even have Google maps installed on my phone any more. GMaps feels like it’s pushing me to businesses that advertise with them, as they get highlighted all over their interface.
I can’t stand nowadays when I get an email with an address that links to google maps. All of our OSes have default handlers for addresses as they do for phone numbers, so just let me use my preference already.
For driving directions I do use Apple Maps, it’s not bad! But for travel planning or trying to find a place to eat it’s still rough around the edges for me.
I'd agree, but business information is really the killer thing in a maps app a lot of the time. It's a lot of the reason OSM is often near useless even with a good app overlay. Much like most people don't know people's phone numbers any more, I don't actually know the street address for most places I go.
Outside of Google and Yelp, who else has anything close to an effective database of business information, including hours, names, addresses...
youtube is the only thing i find it hard to do without. i thought maps would be a hard one to give up but ive been using openstreetmap for 5 years now and ive only needed to use goggle maps maybe twice in all that time.
i would imagine its a bit hit and miss depending on where you live and whether there have been people contributing to osm in that area
i also don't have much use for traffic data which helps
One thing map Google Maps seems to lack is moving street labels. When I zoom in and out, I still want to see the names of the streets. They're not physical maps, why not always show me the name of the street? It doesn't need to be a series of static images at different zoom levels, they could just move the name of the street around, but they don't. Sometimes I zoom in on Google Maps and a street name will disappear despite the entire street being visible and it showing the name before. It's beyond frustrating. Strangely enough, randomly highlighted businesses and their dollar sign prices estimates never seem to disappear...
However, there are two things that keep me on Google Maps that others don't seem to have:
1. Public transit directions - I live without a car, I want to be able to get directions that use the subway, and I've never seen anything comparable to what Google Maps does here in combining walking+subway (or occasionally the bus if there's no other choice) directions. Google Maps also highlights everything in the correct colors (Red for Red Line, green for Green Line, blue for Blue Line, orange for Orange Line, purple for commuter rail (painted purple IRL) and yellow for buses (painted yellow IRL)), which matches my mental model for how I get around in the city.
2. Web based API - One of my main uses for Google Maps is checking directions on my PC before I leave my home. Despite Google's best attempts to hide it (and all browsers' best attempts to hide their bookmark shortcut feature for some reason), you can bookmark shortcuts with URL queries to skip the increasingly sluggish Google Maps UI and get results directly. I use the following:
The lack of street labels drives me crazy sometimes! I used to love GMaps a decade ago. It was snappy and still did most of what it does today, but quicker. Now it's just frustrating with all the cards automatically sliding around. Thanks for the bookmarking tips!
A vaguely relevant anecdote: in my year before joining Google, I was a Patent Agent, and I got assigned to help Chinedu Echeruo of HopStop [1] with his patent. He was in NYC and I never actually met him; we just talked on the phone.
"Nigeria" is almost a joke in tech circles, with all the Princes who need your help to get their fortunes out, but Chinedu is Nigerian.
At the time, his was the only service that had NYC transit schedules online, and he did it largely by paper-scraping! They would take the paper bus & subway schedules, and OCR or hand-code the data. Nowadays, almost every city has their transit schedules online. HopStop was bought by Apple eventually.
Ah yes, Linux, Amazon, Meta, and a company that's been running a map service for seventeen years in a failing attempt at direct competition with Google maps. This is just the Bing show with new guests, isn't it?
This group are cooperating to define common data structures and references - for data under their respective purviews - to supercede the status quo, where each company uses their own proprietary structures (a status quo which results in tedious work - for mapping projects the world over - when data from different sources is combined in a project).
That is the "GERS" and "Schema" aspects of the project.
It's very much back-end stuff, but the vision is that the resulting data collaboration will improve the job of working with map data from different sources.
Leading to the other key project points, "QA" - whereby data from different sources can be more easily compared and corrected, once it's all sharing common structures and IDs; and ultimately the last key project point "Collaborative Map Building", which all the previous steps have worked to enable.
Commercial service/product might be an end point for the Overture project as a whole, leveraging all the aforementioned work to result in (they hope) a kind of "mapping data consortium", but frankly what most of us care about is the way data (and it's interoperation) in general may be improved by this keystone effort. Such that, a few years down the track, we back-end map workers can source data from different places and have it all line up - I don't mean spatially, but in data structure and identity.
They're saying this like Google doesn't deserve all it's earned here.
Creating maps, endlessly tweaking UX, creating street view, integration with Waze, much faster updates around road construction than any other service, search for companies inside the map based on abstracted terms, 3D-views... any "monopoly" is well earned.
Google isn't forcing users to use their maps, Google just has hands down the best maps and features.
I'm a die-hard DDG user, but I still use g! when I want to see maps or look up directions.
That said, serious competition would also be good for Google. The maps org is still huge but a lot of what they are doing is tiny iterative improvements these days, not enough swinging for the fences to really add new and exciting products/APIs. If nothing else comes of this, hopefully it spooks some Geo org planners into thinking bigger.
Fair... but the competition needs a lot of years to catch up, I feel.
I had to use another map tool for a client in a country that didn't love Google.
God... it was so clunky horrible. All the stuff I thought was simple, like dropping map pins, and stylizing the UI... with the other map it took 10x as long, and just behaved poorly. We were dropping like 40k pins across a country, and the other service didn't even have like a smart clustering feature... so we had to create a bunch of filters and toggles -- rather than just being able to say "5k pins in this city" when they were zoomed out, we had to force users to selected the right filters and then just slow them scattered "blah" as they zoomed. Anyway, totally agree it'd be good to have more competition on this space... but like it's gonna be a few years before the competition pushes Google to do much more than just iterate.
Apple is doing a pretty good job with directions, but they still don't have the "business listings" or abstract searches done right.
A lot of tools out there are OK for directions, but without street-view... or even somewhat recent satellite view... the maps aren't up-to-date. Like... take an area in your city where you know there's construction. Google's on it, like almost as soon as the construction crews start. Apple... they're not far off, especially if there's a detour required. Bing... Open Street Map... forget it, it'll be a month or two, or longer, before they can plot around construction. I'm sure it's hard for companies to dedicate resources until people are using the tool, and of course nobody will use the tool until the dedicate resources. Google's ability to pull in business listings, and reviews, and good directions... it's gonna be a really tall order to get anyone else to dedicate enough resources to push Google farther.
It's a nice start but what we also need would be an "OpenRasterMap" project - a project where we collect raster data (more and more data gets available) and store the entire planet (RGBN aerial imagery) in let's say 1m/Pixel.
It might be feasible to store entire planet's raster tiles in 10 years in a (beefy) desktop machine.
Sentinel-2 provides worldwide coverage in 10m resolution and is open data. It would be challenging to reach worldwide 1m coverage, even for the big players.
You may also want to have a look at OpenTopography, following a similar principle but for elevation data.
Yes, I am aware of Sentinel-2 10m data (RGBN), there are even commercial offerings. Actually the storage requirements are not that big for 10m, like ~4TB for the entire (non-water) world. Napkin math:
- 15000 Sentinel-2 scenes over land
- 10980^2 pixels per scene
- 50% lossless compression per scene
- 4 channels (RGB and infrared)
This results in 15000 * 10980^2 * 4 * 0.5 / 1024*4 ~ 3.3TB. This matches commercial offerings like in https://cloudless.eox.at/#data. Of course we have to add lower-scale imagery that is often used to provide XYZ tiling that would further increase the storage requirements.
Thanks for the link to OpenTopography, it's an interesting project and elevation data is extremely valuable.
Very happy to see this happen and be open-source. I'll probably stick to OpenStreetMap and OpenMapTiles to generate my basemaps but they'll most likely benefit from the "competition".
> All this data and interoperability talk makes this project seem aimed more at the Google Maps API rather than the consumer-level navigation app.
This is rather disappointing, for me google maps is still the only thing I can't find a good replacement for.
OSM is extremely out of date, its search is basically useless for anything other than public parks, as no one bothers to put their places outside google maps.
Even using google maps offline is better than osmand and others.
My current flow is to search on google map web then copy the open location code into the app.
Google Maps is an incredible product. Having traveled a lot lately it dawned on me even more. It's super helpful navigating the public transport in Japan, where even the natives use it as well as the most remote places in Indonesia, where even the natives use it. Simply incredible. I would pay for it.
Would be cool to have Tesla's existing cameras collect photo snapshots for analysis. One of the few sources with the scope to ground truth maps at very low cost.
At low cost though, instrumenting uber or lyft cars would be interesting too. Or UPS/Fedex/Amazon vans.
Lol. LF teams up with MS! The natural course should have been supporting OSM. This will eventually effectively kill OSM not G Maps. Linux fights monopoly with monopolies!
they should be competing with Waze, not Google maps. Waze does all the things you want a mapping app to do, either by flagging traffic events or cops, marking roads under construction, or just having a pleasant UI.
I'm aware Waze and Maps are finally merging together, but let's be real, all the good stuff Maps has gotten recently has come from the Waze side of the house anyway.
Maps are actually a hard problem to solve. When I got my certificate in GIS 20 years ago, people had no idea what GIS was. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for over 5 years paying accident claims and exactly one person knew what GIS was when they met me.
I was taught that good data is hard to come by and can be 60 percent of the cost of a project. GPS can be very accurate if you use enough satellites for enough time, but that is probably the exception not the norm. Much GPS data is more like within about 30 feet of the thing.
When the international foot was defined in 1959, a great deal of survey data was already available based on the former definitions, especially in the United States and in India. The small difference between the survey foot and the international foot would not be detectable on a survey of a small parcel, but becomes significant for mapping, or when the state plane coordinate system (SPCS) is used in the US, because the origin of the system may be hundreds of thousands of feet (hundreds of miles) from the point of interest. Hence the previous definitions continued to be used for surveying in the United States and India for many years, and are denoted survey feet to distinguish them from the international foot. The United Kingdom was unaffected by this problem, as the retriangulation of Great Britain (1936–62) had been done in meters.
A fundamental issue is that Maps are 2D and Earth is 3D. Additionally, Earth is not a perfect sphere. This is part of why there are many different map projections, each of which distort something and thus your projection should be chosen based on what you are trying to show on the map. Some projections are better for, say, just North America.
Maps also say as much or more about the mind of the map maker as they do geographic reality. We record a lot of human or political data in maps and biases in how dominant cultures view the world can be readily seen in how we map the world. There are interesting videos about maps of Oceania that show this very clearly, for example: https://youtu.be/tCsHWmAKCgQ
In spite of having a Certificate in GIS, I've never managed to do some of the technical things I've wanted to do with open source. I do use open source tiles and Paint to make maps I like for some of my websites.
Please don't underestimate how hard this problem space is. I wish there were more options in the mapping space that served my needs. I've looked around at times and found that many of the available resources simply can't do what I want.
I hope this is successful and I look forward to reading up on it more and seeing if it may be relevant to my needs.
Apropos. Lowest Layer is called "Graffiti Layer". It serves same purposes, but instead defacing the scenery you do it in virtual world. Graffiti lovers can then but their VR glasses on and walk around admiring these artworks.
Legal issues like doxxing are easy. The map contains only pingable URLs and somebody else is legally responsible for the wrongspeak.
Going by the current discussions around Twitter and Facebook (by both the left and the right), I don't believe that's the conclusion most people would come to. Both sides want to hold the platform responsible for their users speech, albeit this is charitably phrased in statements such as "companies should do more to prevent (political bias|misinformation)."
I work with GIS data from multiple sources. Neither Google's APIs nor OSM nor Bing nor anything else is enough for applications with high specs. You need to mix machine learning and available sources.
Doing this is a PITA. Sources rarely match one another (e.g. an object will be referenced on both Bing and OSM, but 20 meters apart, with no way of accurately matching them in the middle of a dense city).
The article very clearly says that the goals include making the existing services interoperable, which would be a big advance for API customers. (This isn't about making a new Google Maps competitor, it's about a Google Maps _API_ competitor, though it will surely help build the former too.)
Just being able to download the same area from Bing and OSM and seeing "this house has ID 234 here and 234 here, that's the same building" would be great, because that lets you gather all the available information about it instead of having to choose one or use matching algorithms that can make mistakes. It can also remove false positives, which also happen.