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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: 3, Interesting) by letssee on Thursday December 15 2016, @10:37AM

    by letssee (2537) on Thursday December 15 2016, @10:37AM (#441554)

    While this is all true, it is still cool you can download everything and not have some third party know exactly where you plan to go.

    I once selected a part of london for offline use in google maps and immediately I started getting ads for hotels in london. I don't really like that sort of spying.

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  • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:36AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:36AM (#441565) Journal

    You might want to try HERE maps [google.com] as well. (As disclosed in another comment, I work for them. But they are nevertheless good.) Offline navigation works IMO better than any OSM routing apps I saw. For countryside pedestrian-navigation, OSM might be better.

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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday December 15 2016, @03:58PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday December 15 2016, @03:58PM (#441645) Homepage
      Ah, Here. Once Nokia ('til sold for 2.8B). Previously NAVTEQ (which was bought for 5.7B).

      It was indeed a good map dataset, in particular for car drivers, and I still use the Nokia incarnation on one of my phones when I'm travelling abroad (I use that phone *only* for maps, in fact, it's basically a shitty out-of-date GPS. I use the previous model phone as my phone.)

      Day-to-day, being in Europe, I'm an OSM person - street-wise it's very accurate and up-to-date. I find town venues can be out-of-date (some bars/restaurants stay only open for a matter of months in the part of town where I live), and I'd like to update them but don't know how. I simply drop markers where I see there's an inconsistency. That's my only contribution to the "open" service, but I'd happily do more, as it is one I make a lot of use of.
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