[HN Gopher] OpenStreetMap is in trouble - a critical take on Bin...
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OpenStreetMap is in trouble - a critical take on Bing Map Builder
Author : pietervdvn
Score : 186 points
Date : 2023-02-06 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openstreetmap.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openstreetmap.org)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| authors work site:
|
| https://mapcomplete.osm.be/?language=en
| sccxy wrote:
| [flagged]
| lallysingh wrote:
| What are you talking about? The page says:
|
| "Welcome to MapComplete MapComplete is an OpenStreetMap-
| viewer and editor, which shows you information about features
| of a specific theme and allows to update it."
| pietervdvn wrote:
| Hi there!
|
| Author here! I take pride in crediting OSM, so it is on
| multiple places. There even is an entire explanation on why
| OSM rocks under the 'copyright' tab. It's gonna move soon to
| be a standalone button.
|
| Furthermore, a panel showing the community index is in the
| works.
| sccxy wrote:
| OSM does not like that you hide copyright away to some
| button.
|
| It must be VERY visible all the time.
|
| It is not the case always when you show OSM data.
|
| I have got very angry letters from OSM enthusiasts about
| that "hidden copyright".
| detaro wrote:
| All I can find on their website meets the OSM attribution
| guidelines, so please be specific where you think they
| "fail to properly credit openstreetmap" if you throw such
| accusations around.
| sccxy wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/kLfv65T.png
|
| OSM data, but no visible credit.
| pietervdvn wrote:
| Whoops, that's supposed to look like this:
| https://imgur.com/Jh2OTLm
|
| I mostly (only) test in firefox, and Chrome handles this
| differently it seems.
| [deleted]
| detaro wrote:
| I assume that's the attribution from the tile layer. In
| their screenshot they have an imagery layer selected,
| which obviously doesn't have an OSM credit. You could
| probably tell leaflet (or whatever map-JS you use) to
| show an OSM credit always to credit the POIs, although
| strictly speaking your existing credit in the sidebar
| should be sufficient.
| detaro wrote:
| After a loading screen crediting it, and after you've
| dismissed the sidebar crediting it, which is again
| reachable with a click. Sufficient attribution as far as
| I can tell.
| [deleted]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I studied geography for about eight years in university and
| something that drove me kinda mad is how cartographic authoring
| tools were more like CAD software than they were like video games
| (I once had a short rant over dinner with the President of ESRI
| Canada about how my GPU is built for rendering geometries and
| ArcGIS ignores its existence).
|
| On the surface, the CAD pedigree makes sense. But... why aren't
| more tools like video games? Make it super easy for anyone to
| start getting involved.
|
| I remember all the gatekeeping-like discussion in "Public
| Participation GIS" seminars: you've gotta be an expert to author
| good data because there's so many ways to do it wrong. Blah. No.
|
| One of my daydreams if I get FU money is to make an incredibly
| user friendly set of web based analytical GIS tools. Not just the
| basics like buffering and queries, but the entire spatial toolbox
| to build data processing pipelines. I want a layperson to be able
| to ask "where should I buy a house if I care about these four
| parameters?" (and for it to not be a hidden magic purpose built
| portal on some realtor website)
|
| The immediate retort from my internal pessimist is "the data
| isn't available or isn't consistent" but I don't buy that
| anymore. I remember having to go ask nicely to obtain shapefiles
| from my city. Decades later it's all just online. And the
| community can help catalog data sources, add metadata about
| transforming them to standard schemas, and sharing data pipelines
| with the community in some sort of catalog.
|
| I really think it's a UX problem above all else.
| agumonkey wrote:
| gamification of things is discussed, but it's still not
| discussed enough (one could even argue that we could reach back
| to pedagogics ala piaget).
|
| that said there's one aspect about gamification is that it
| often stops working when information requires deep thinking
|
| but it might still be fixable
|
| i'd love to make everything game like, society as a whole would
| benefit from it (it could even save energy)
| pietervdvn wrote:
| The reason that I haven't pursued a gamification approach
| with https://mapcomplete.osm.be is twofold:
|
| - I'm focusing on other usability issues (and features) first
| - I'm worried that "mapping for points" instead of "mapping
| to have a good map/help the community/map what the
| contributor needs" will result in lower data quality. Before
| implementing such a thing, this should be thoroughly studied
| agumonkey wrote:
| True, and even the idea of "points" might be shallow
| gamification. Creating fun incentives might (I'm now
| knowledgeable, I'm just a person and I know the power of
| fun in learning and working) come in other clothes.
|
| Good luck :)
| joelfooxj wrote:
| RE: Canadian GIS data. I thought it was really cool that most
| Canadian cities offer LIDAR scans for download by the public
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| A root cause of the problem you've identified is that the tools
| are designed to offer first-class support for cartographic
| applications that pre-date the use of computers. Almost none of
| this has any relevance to modern geospatial analytics but it
| pervades the way the software works. Users that just want to
| build a modern analytic application are still forced to deal
| with this legacy baggage even though it provides no value to
| them and often makes their applications worse. The learning
| curve is unnecessarily steep.
|
| Like you, I am of the opinion that a new set of GIS tools that
| focus solely on the needs of modern geospatial analysis users
| would be amazing.
|
| Another gap is that cartographic tools have a deep assumption
| that geometry does not move. They don't provide support for
| correctly reasoning about spatiotemporal relationships, which
| are pretty important in modern geospatial applications.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Your last paragraph resonates strongly with me. I've taken my
| GIS skills and applied it to mobile robotics and performance
| often falls off a cliff when the moving elements aren't
| treated very carefully.
|
| OpenLayers and the rest do a great job these days, though.
| But a lot of the APIs are clearly intended for set and
| forget. "Why would you want to update this at 60hz?" I hear
| it asking me.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I have thought it would be cool to send in swarms of connected
| drones to do more detailed maps of national parks, with
| images... First time I thought about it was in the petrified
| forest in AZ. That it would be cool to actually (virtually) see
| more than just the path you weren't supposed to leave. But
| could apply to many things... lots of cameras, sensors and
| pictures.
| tpxl wrote:
| > where should I buy a house if I care about these four
| parameters?
|
| A lot of this data exists, and is freely available.
|
| I used to work for a startup where we tried to accurately
| predict the amount of sun a particular plot of land would get.
| You can pretty much get a 3d map of the world with 5m accuracy
| (or even more granular, but the datasets get ridiculously big
| at that point), then render a 360deg view from any location in
| the world and simulate the sun movement. You can even get 3d
| models of some cities to take buildings into account (the earth
| model is ground only). The startup eventually failed for Covid
| reasons.
|
| Satellite data is available for most of the world for things
| like wind speed, cloudiness, vegetation, ...
|
| If you live in a decent country you may be able to freely get
| data for zoning, power lines, internet, building density,
| public transport...
|
| You can build a really good dataset to evaluate a particular
| plot of land if you combine all this data.
|
| Anyway, hit me up if you ever get that FU money, because I'd
| also like to do something like this :)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| energy-generating systems will always attract money, since
| they produce something that sells, by definition.
| Unfortunately you are therefore out of luck.. there will be
| an endless line of new entries to do what you already did..
|
| on the other side of the coin, is water, flooding and tides.
| Oceans are rising, many storms are more intense and flood
| events are increasing. Take your 3D knowledge and apply it to
| safety for floods and water events. No one wants that work,
| it is tedious and data-heavy. Yet, that is what is needed for
| many people who will not or cannot do it themselves. good
| luck
| fingerlocks wrote:
| > You can pretty much get a 3d map of the world with 5m
| accuracy
|
| I'm having trouble locating high res DEM files. I can easily
| find arc second granular data (~30m accuracy at my latitude),
| but beyond that, it appears it's locked down for academic use
| or by request only. Where are you getting these freely
| available datasets?
|
| I'm not a GIS person, I dabble in map stuff for personal use,
| so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious somewhere.
| qwertox wrote:
| The lack of high res DEM files angers me a lot as well. 30m
| simply isn't enough and then there are projects like
| TanDEM-X where it isn't clear why they can't share the 12m
| x 12m data with the public if it's mostly payed through
| public funding.
| paganel wrote:
| > You can pretty much get a 3d map of the world with 5m
| accuracy (
|
| Related, maybe OT, but you seem a person that knows a lot
| more about this than I would know: more exactly I wanted to
| ask you if you know of a decent enough method to get the
| height of a building based on GoogleStreetView.
|
| Meaning, I'm "inside" GoogleStreetView, I'm looking at a
| "building" from outside on the street, I know the geo
| coordinates of the camera that took the photo, I know the geo
| coordinates of the building, so that I know the distance
| between the photo camera and the building, I can "count" (for
| lack of a better word) the building's size in screen pixels
| (or some other unit/reference? which one?), and based on all
| that I'm curious if one can get the real height in meters of
| said building.
|
| From what I could found around on some other forums there
| were people mentioning the aperture of the GoogleStreetView
| photo camera being part of the "equation" to compute it all,
| and that would be a problem because we do not know the values
| for the aperture. I have no idea though if all that
| discussion was on the subject or not.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| The images need to be rectified or else, yes, the lens
| distortion messes up the measurements.
|
| Really you just need a length and an angle to complete the
| triangle. The length is easy: measure distance from base of
| building to any point where you know the angle. But getting
| the angle from a point to the top of the building is
| tricky. I don't know if any clever way to estimate that
| without stereo imagery.
|
| A lot of this stuff is automatically calculated when a
| digital surface model (DSM) is generated from stereo pairs
| of images. So you might be able to just look it up in
| Google Earth. This is the data (probably blended with many
| other sources such as LiDAR and ground survey data) Google
| uses to extrude buildings into 3D models.
|
| P.S. this was an assignment in 1st year for me. Estimate
| the height of the CN Tower from some aerial photos. I feel
| like I should remember more.
| dark-star wrote:
| The StreetComplete app for Android is a bit like a game and
| helps update "trivial" tagging tasks on OSM. I used it a bit
| while cycling around my hometown. Simply stop, see what you can
| tag/update, and continue cycling.
|
| There should be more of these simple apps like that
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Every Door is really good too (it's Flutter, so iOS/Android).
| I polished off a shopping centre near here in record time
| with it.
| raybb wrote:
| Links to mentioned apps:
|
| https://every-door.app/
|
| https://streetcomplete.app/
| bjourne wrote:
| Unfortunately, OSM takes clear political stances and does not use
| internationally recognized borders when they should. That is
| antithetical to freedom (as in free software) and is why I would
| never donate to the project.
| redfast00 wrote:
| There is a policy about this:
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputed_territories
| mistrial9 wrote:
| could you be more specific ?
|
| If the Openstreetmap is a description of things that are
| visible, like built roads, buildings and named places.. How are
| disputed borders stopping the useful building of a map? Doesn't
| the United Nations and many Federal governments, have
| conventions for showing and discussing borders in dispute?
|
| Why would disputed borders in some places, stop the (obviously)
| global project from continuing to map the real, physical place
| of Earth ?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Such as?
| mtmail wrote:
| Not OP but I can give an example. Kosovo is recognized by 101
| of 193 UN members. Something can be international recognized
| and still whatever option you show on a map you potentially
| anger half the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati
| onal_recognition_of_K... . Somaliland isn't recognized by UN
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somaliland There's 4 possible
| maps of Western Sahara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politica
| l_status_of_Western_Sa... Crimea is either Russian or
| Ukranian on some maps, for a while both in OSM
| jmkb wrote:
| Just to be clear: this is an individual user's "diary" (blog)
| hosted at openstreetmap.org, not in any way an official statement
| from the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
|
| And I agree with the author that the design of Bing Map Builder
| looks problematic. The biggest problem being that it's
| segregating its contributors from the general OSM population in
| the name of "privacy."
| pietervdvn wrote:
| Indeed - this is my opinion, not the opinion of
| "OpenStreetMap". Thanks for pointing this out!
| uneekname wrote:
| Microsoft has historically been a fairly good ally to the
| OpenStreetMap community. We use Bing imagery a lot in our mapping
| efforts, as well as their buildings dataset, just to name two
| examples.
|
| I hope that Microsoft owns up to this mistake, and pivots back to
| supporting our community rather than fracturing it. As the
| article notes, the OSM community is very sensitive about how
| large corporations communicate with us as they contribute.
| pietervdvn wrote:
| That's what I'm hoping as well. I specifically wrote this essay
| with the hope that this will be corrected.
|
| And I don't think that big, corporate involvement is
| necessarily evil - but we should hold them to a higher standard
| and be critical of them in due time.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| yeah but in a strange twist, the Meta Overture project appears
| to have hired this guy as a major architect (corrections
| welcome)
|
| https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/
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(page generated 2023-02-06 23:01 UTC)