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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: 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.