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Serge Wroclawski, a long-time contributor to OpenStreetMap, has posted a criticism of the management choices he believes are preventing the OpenStreetMap Foundation from fulfilling its mission (much like the Wikimedia Foundation):
I feel the OpenStreetMap project is currently unable to fulfill that mission due to poor technical decisions, poor political decisions, and a general malaise in the project. I'm going to outline in this article what I think OpenStreetMap has gotten wrong. It's entirely possible that OSM will reform and address the impediments to its success- and I hope it does. We need a Free as in Freedom geographic dataset.
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OpenStreetMap May be in Serious Trouble
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Shimitar on Wednesday February 21 2018, @01:59PM (13 children)
While i do not know enough to understand if this is just a rant for secondary motives or a genuive dis-enchantment, i must agree OSM so far is quite a disappointment to me. For some of my own needs i choose to use OSM as a mapping tool and:
1- it's really poorly documented
2- You need a "renderer" unless you roll your own
3- You end up feeling like you are "stealing" and wondering what OSM actually is.
I agree that something should change to make OSM more useful to people than it is right now. I don't care for "internals" (tehcnical whys), but i whish OSM was easier to use as a WEB/app developer.
Another great point i agree on is that the real jiuce is not in the mappinga data itself, but in the actual extra-info: like business hours, prices, reviews and so on. This the fight of the future and the area where a Libre solution will be most important right now.
Coding is an art. No, java is not coding. Yes, i am biased, i know, sorry if this bothers you.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 21 2018, @02:45PM (12 children)
Very true, though some of the libraries are much better. I added a map thing for a conference that we organised using an off-the-shelf JavaScript OSM thing (I forget which one, it was a few years ago) and was able to upload GPX plots created with the maps app on my phone to indicate locations of important things, with very little effort. If you want to contribute (and this ties into your third point), the learning curve is very steep. I mostly just leave comments on their web interface, rather than try to figure out how to contribute something more useful.
That's a bug, not a feature. They decouple the data from the presentation. There are a load of different renderers available with different performance characteristics, for different uses. To give a concrete example of why this is useful, the University of Cambridge used to maintain its own mapping system for all of the university and college buildings (and various other buildings that, over time, random people had said were important to include). This was costing a lot of money to maintain, so a few years back they contributed all of the data to OSM (including information that members of the public can't collect without trespassing) and wrote a new renderer. Their renderer includes a bunch of data that the standard ones ignore (for example, the location of the porters' lodge is not a thing most people displaying maps care about, but is very important for a Cambridge College) and looks exactly the same as their old mapping system, so they were able to switch to it without anyone noticing.
I agree here. It would be great to have a simple UI for people who want to upload this kind of data. You can't currently, for example, do a search for a pharmacy that's open on Sundays with the OSM data (even if you download the whole thing). This kind of thing should be easy for people to provide and would be a very good way of getting people involved in the project.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 21 2018, @05:14PM (10 children)
It would be great to have a simple UI for people who want to upload this kind of data. You can't currently, for example, do a search for a pharmacy that's open on Sundays with the OSM data (even if you download the whole thing). This kind of thing should be easy for people to provide and would be a very good way of getting people involved in the project.
I honestly don't see how you'd do this with an open-source thing, unless you set up a foundation with a big endowment like Wikimedia so that it could run a large datacenter and basically be just like Google Maps. Hours of operation change from time to time (esp. on holidays), and as I understand it, with Google Maps, businesses can contact them and get that information updated. And reviews are constantly changing, plus need some level of moderation. These things just don't lend themselves to a static downloadable dataset; the OSM maps are already huge and take up a ton of space on your phone, and downloading new ones (updates) uses a lot of data and time since they don't seem to have a way of downloading deltas.
For better or worse, this is what's made Google Maps so popular: not just having maps and navigation, but also being able to search for businesses by name or type (e.g. "grocery store" or "italian restaurant"), and then see operating hours and reviews, have it warn you that the place will be closing in 10 minutes by the time you get there, etc. Other real-time information is also valuable, especially traffic updates so it re-routes you when there's an accident for instance. OSM doesn't do any of this stuff, and doesn't really have a way to: you need to have someone running a datacenter and providing customer service to make this kind of stuff work. This doesn't mean OSM is useless; there's real value in having this data publicly accessible ("open source", or should I say "open data"?) so that for-profit companies like Google can use it, along with any new competitors that may arise. But the other convenient services on top just don't lend themselves to being replicated this way.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:16PM (5 children)
Some changes could bring it closer. You identified a big one, make it possible to just send deltas. Add a torrent like system with signed data and they cut way down on bandwidth costs while keeping things updated.
If they add site metadata (like store hours, web page, phone number, etc) those records could be owned by the business for the purpose of updates.
But agred, it would be very hard for a free and open project to do everything Google maps can do.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:37PM (4 children)
Some changes could bring it closer. You identified a big one, make it possible to just send deltas. Add a torrent like system with signed data and they cut way down on bandwidth costs while keeping things updated.
That would help, but the way it is now, it seems that this goes against business models. OSMand in particular only lets you download 3 maps for free, and wants you to pay to download more (including updates, I think).
If they add site metadata (like store hours, web page, phone number, etc) those records could be owned by the business for the purpose of updates.
I wonder how much it'd bloat up the datasets to include this information. But having the business "own" this data only works if there's some organization in place to make sure businesses can update this data, that other people can't sabotage it, etc. Someone running a restaurant might want to sabotage the information about their competitors, posting that they're closed or have short hours on important holidays, for instance.
But agred, it would be very hard for a free and open project to do everything Google maps can do.
Yeah, my point exactly, and maybe they shouldn't try, and should just stick to the map data. Another thing that Google Maps does well is public transit: it'll take into account when trains/buses are scheduled to arrive and how long they take. It also takes into account historical traffic data, so you can plan how long a journey by car will take on a particular Monday morning, for instance. All this requires a lot of work and a big datacenter.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:59AM (3 children)
I just wish the mobile version of google maps would let me drag routes to an alternate like the browser version does (rather than just choosing between a couple proposed routes).
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 22 2018, @05:15AM
I completely agree. That's a really handy feature.
The mobile Google Maps also kinda sucks if you have multiple stops on your route; it's not that easy to look at the stops, reorder them, delete one, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:23PM (1 child)
The mobile version of Google Maps USED TO let you do that. The feature was REMOVED.
Google Maps seems to just get crappier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:27PM
Google Maps mobile has removed features and gotten crappier over time so I can't 100% confirm that it used to enable route dragging, but I seem to recall that it did.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:36PM
You realise, I hope, that OpenStreetMap does already have a web UI for browsing the maps and getting routing information, and that this lets you leave comments reporting errors? The only change that they'd need would be to extend the comments box to allow more structured input, and streamline the approvals process (i.e. rather than having a trusted contributor read the comment and translate it into OSM internal data, you provide them with accept / reject buttons).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @07:13PM
uh, blockchain?
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday February 21 2018, @07:50PM (1 child)
People do the work for Google maps. You establish a business account with Google (which is free), claim your business on Google Maps (I don't remember the process, but I think it involved answering physical mail sent to the address). Then you keep the information up-to-date yourself. Google Maps is important enough that business owners are willing to do this. There's no reason the same couldn't work for OSM, but only once they reach a certain degree of importance. And it does involve a budget - someone has to handle the initial check, to make sure you are the business owner.
I think OSM has just reached a size where volunteer work doesn't quite cut it anymore. It's difficult, when an OSS project reaches a certain maturity - lots of the work isn't "fun" anymore, and volunteers only get you so far. Seems to me that OSM really needs a couple of commercial sponsors to provide funding for actual staff.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:34PM
People do the work for Google maps. You establish a business account with Google (which is free), claim your business on Google Maps (I don't remember the process, but I think it involved answering physical mail sent to the address). Then you keep the information up-to-date yourself. Google Maps is important enough that business owners are willing to do this. There's no reason the same couldn't work for OSM
That's wrong, and you just showed why. According to you, Google sends physical mail to the business address, then allows that business to maintain the information, which is kept on Google's servers.
Who's going to pay for sending out millions of pieces of mail to these businesses? That's not cheap. Who's going to maintain all this infrastructure? Those datacenters don't run themselves. This isn't a static file: the businesses need to be able to log in to their accounts and update their info, and then that info needs to get to users quickly to be useful.
And it does involve a budget - someone has to handle the initial check, to make sure you are the business owner.
Exactly. Free software rarely does well with stuff like this: it requires some type of business. If you're lucky, you can set up something like Mozilla that's a nonprofit company, which can hire employees to do this stuff. But that takes a lot of money, which has to come from somewhere. Who's going to contribute millions of dollars needed to set this up for mapping, when there's already *multiple* commercial competitors with products that are totally free for users?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @10:22AM
From what follows, I suspect that's exactly the opposite of what you wanted to say.