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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, Informative) by q.kontinuum on Thursday December 15 2016, @02:49PM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Thursday December 15 2016, @02:49PM (#441612) Journal

    "In rural areas", I have to disagree. Streets are still quite accurate, I think.
    "pedestrian" && "In rural areas" might be a different story. I did see some paths not suitable for anything else but pedestrian. But yes, it's only very few. That's why I wrote I found OSM superior for those use-cases. In cities-centers HERE pedestrian navigation seems quite ok.

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