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posted by martyb on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the Waiting-for-Open-Panopticon dept.

One of the great bright lights of open-source software and user-driven community projects is OpenStreetMap, which offers an open-source mapping platform similar to, but also very philosophically different than, Google Maps.

It manages to duplicate most of Google Maps using primarily the contributions of enthusiastic users, too.

In my experience, OpenStreetMap is every bit as accurate as Google Maps and quite frequently surpasses it, particularly outside the US. That it is even anywhere close to Google Maps is a testament to massive amount of time and effort the OpenStreetMap community has invested in the project.

One place that Google Maps has always had OpenStreetMap beat, though, is Google Street View, for which – until relatively recently – there was no OSM equivalent.

Telenav, one of OSM's major supporters, has now launched a new project dubbed OpenStreetView with the goal of crowdsourcing street-level photography for OpenStreetMap across the globe.

Experience for yourself at https://www.openstreetmap.org.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by isostatic on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:29AM

    by isostatic (365) on Thursday December 15 2016, @09:29AM (#441548) Journal

    I find google far behind OSM, even just on roads (my own road doesn't exist in google for instance). Once you add the rest of the data, footpaths, trainlines, bus stops, etc it's far better. When travelling abroad OSM usually wins too. I see that google finally has some roads in Gaza.

    Google wins with things like realtime traffic, and generally has a better gazetteer

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:06AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:06AM (#441559) Journal

    The road that my house is on is a year old, yet still isn't on Google Maps. It's been on OSM for at least six months (not sure when it was added, that was when I first checked). I generally find OSM to be more accurate (and was amused that this was even true in the two blocks nearest the Google Maps HQ).

    Complaining about the appearance of OSM completely misses the point: it is not a maps app, it is an open data set. The web site has four renderers built in, but there are a load of others. I use OSMAnd [osmand.net] on my phone, because I can download an entire country's maps (as vector data, so typically only a few hundred MBs) before I travel and not have to worry that I've gone outside of the range of the Google Maps cache or having to pay a lot for roaming data (if I even get a signal in some of the places I visit). Because it has vector maps locally, it can do offline navigation, so I don't need roaming data for navigation either. It has its own renderer, and a bunch of customisable options in the view. If you want to embed OSM in your own web page, there are a bunch of libraries and you can either cache their tiles, generate tiles yourself on the server, or use something like cartagen [cartagen.org] to send vector data to the client and render client-side.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @08:28AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @08:28AM (#441994)

      not sure when it was added, that was when I first checked

      When they built a new motorway here, it was added to OpenStreetMap at least half a year before it was finished. The day the motorway was opened, the "construction" tag was removed, replacing the dotted line with the real motorway.

      Google Maps did add it maybe a month after it opened, probably imported from OpenStreetMap, but only visually. It took months for them to enable routing, so even though you could see the new motorway, routing from one exit to the next, Google Maps would pick a route following country roads, in some cases crossing the motorway several times.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @06:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @06:38PM (#441717)

    The OSM maps in the southern part of India are also much better than Google maps. The only real issues I've had with OSM is the street directions and U-turns are not always accurate, but I haven't used Google maps enough to compare them on this aspect.