How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

https://theodi.org/article/how-are-facebook-apple-and-microsoft-contributing-to-openstreetmap/

by ephesee • 8 years ago

392 175 8 years ago

ucaetano6• 8 years ago

This is competitive pressures at work, similarly to IBM and other's investment in Linux in the early 2000's as a way to place competitive pressure on MS/Windows.

If you're not the leader in the field, and won't be able to catch up just by investing, you try to make the leadership in the field (Google's) irrelevant.

If the 2nd-best-by-small-margin base map info is open, having the best one isn't a competitive advantage anymore.

nugget• 8 years ago

Google recently hiked enterprise license fees for access to translation services pretty substantially. I wonder if we'll see similar competitive momentum in that market.

ucaetano6• 8 years ago

Most likely, yes. But translation services are far easier to enter than mapping.

nickysielicki3• 8 years ago

Second best? At least in my experience, OSM data is leaps and bounds better than Google Maps in every way possible, and it has been that way for a couple years now. The reason that I still use Google maps is that it's fast and well-integrated with my phone, and it has a lot of added features on top of the actual mapping that makes it very useful --- things like location sharing when you're on a longer road trip, creating a notification on your phone to route to an address from your browser, live traffic information, road closures, and business reviews. In terms of the actual data, though, the details available on OSM puts Google's data to shame.

I've been trying to get Google to fix an incorrect path drawn at a state park that I frequent. I've submitted an alternative route twice now, but it's been denied twice with little explanation. The path is a loop, but Google has it missing half of the loop, off by an eighth of a mile or so, and has it drawn where it cuts through private property. In contrast, OSM's data is completely spot on with what my GPS shows.

The park is in a tourist area, and I go to this park often enough that I've actually ran into multiple people visiting who have been standing on the trail with Google Maps open on their phone, thinking they've made a wrong turn.

I've experienced the same thing at GNP in Montana, BWCA in Minnesota/Canada, and all along the Richardson Highway in Alaska. If you're in a rural area or on public land, OSM data is the best available --- even better than what a ranger station would sell you.

ucaetano6• 8 years ago

Second best? At least in my experience, OSM data is leaps and bounds better than Google Maps in every way possible, and it has been that way for a couple years now.

I'm sure that, for whatever product in the world, you can find a subset of people in the world who will swear that such product is, in they experience, the best in the world.

swiley• 8 years ago

I only use google maps because the goecoding is a lot and I think the routing is done on their computers which makes it a lot faster.

Plus finding good OSM apps is hard.

skate22• 8 years ago

Google's business location coverage in suburban areas is far better than OSM from my XP...by a longshot

usuallymatt• 8 years ago

Mileage varies depending on where you live. I really like the idea of OSM and have tried it on and off for years but it's abysmal for my city. Post code searches come up wrong and my own home address places the map marker the other side of town from my house. Google Maps has been accurate every time I've used it and I've never had any issues. I can't really trust OSM as an accurate source over Google Maps right now but hopefully it improves as time goes on. I really hope it does. I have tried to use open source solutions a lot in my life but I can't with Maps right now.

fireattack3• 8 years ago

My problem with OSM, besides the lack of satellite layer, is that it doesn't seem to offer any (detailed) info of landmarks - just the name, sometimes not even that: for example, some churches are just marked with a cross.

agentdrtran• 8 years ago

Google Maps beats OSM with absolutely no content in regards to POI data and navigation.

orblivion5• 8 years ago

I'm a fan of OSM. Where I am now (New Hampshire), Google beats the heck out of OSM if I'm searching for establishments.

(It's okay though, I'm happy to work toward changing that.)

toomanybeersies• 8 years ago

In my limited experience with trying to use OSM for geocoding using Nominatim, it didn't work very well for New Zealand locations at all. It would generally map the GPS coordinates as being in the centre of the block, rather than the actual address.

freddie_mercury4• 8 years ago

Just another reply saying "OSM is completely useless where I live".

If I enter my street address into Google Maps, it shows my house. If I enter it into OSM it says "No results found" and can't even figure out what country or city I am in.

Semaphor2• 8 years ago

As others said, it depends. Here in my city (Lübeck) in Germany, OSM runs circles around GM and then leisurely sprints towards the goal. When I was in South Africa (Pretoria) OSM was so out of date that it was unusable, and that's without information there that's always been wrong.

collyw• 8 years ago

What's a good phone app to use it with on Andorid? (As I understand it, Open Steet Map is the data).

BrandoElFollito• 8 years ago

I once reported an issue with a stadium in my city. I bike in front of it twice a day. The issue was that it was licated on the wrong side of the road.

They said that they checked and it is ok. I asked them how they did this because, well, I actually see the place twice a day. They said that they have ways to check (or smthg like that).

I then sent M their own stree view link and screenshot. Not good enough. So I have up, I do not need the gps to bike there twice a day.

Two years later, suddenly it was approved.

All my corrections are now approved automatically (within an hour or so) so they may have improved.

I also told them to check on OSM where I also updated some information about the surroundings :)

another-cuppa2• 8 years ago

Google does not have the best base map info. OSM may well be the best global base map, actually. Google's advantage is their applications that use the data.

golfer• 8 years ago

Citation please? What do base your statement of fact on?

MintPattern• 8 years ago

What are some OSM-based mobile apps that I can compare against Google with?

sabas_ge3• 8 years ago

In what area? OSM data cover lots of use cases. For navigation on Android check out Maps.me or Osmand.

orblivion5• 8 years ago

Seems like OSM has a future. This is great. Only sad thing is perhaps some day we won't be able to have the fun of making contributions ourselves, if the big companies handle all that for us like Google does. In the mean time, though, I can make an easier case to people as to why they should care about this, since it's now used by Apple and Pokémon Go.

nextos• 8 years ago

OSM worked great for me on newly built streets in Cambridge UK, where Google Maps had zero cartography.

The only major disadvantage of OSM-derived applications is the lack of real-time traffic information. Google Maps harvests data from phones inside cars and some car navigation systems. They also buy it from third parties.

http://opentraffic.io/ is trying to do some data harvesting, but it's still not very good. Another option would be to build an aggregator. Lots of governments publish real-time traffic data, so it should be a matter of integrating that into an OSM layer.

Lastly, there's this old technology called Traffic Message Channel which uses RDS (digital data on FM radio) to broadcast traffic warnings. It's quite popular in Western Europe. There's already a F-Droid application that is trying to provide an interface for that: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.vonglasow.michael.qz/

I cannot stress how important live traffic information is. Without live traffic, navigating on densely populated areas is a nightmare. It's the only part of my mobile workflow I can't do using F-Droid applications. I'm currently forced to use a web version of Google Maps.

danpat• 8 years ago

Here at Mapbox we're doing navigation on OSM with traffic data - we collect our own telemetry, and use it to guide OSM-based routing. There are numerous Android/iOS apps using our API that you could use, or you could build one yourself.

muglug• 8 years ago

OSM worked great for me on newly built streets in Cambridge UK, where Google Maps had zero cartography.

Cambridge is incredibly atypical, though, given its large number of smart people without much money.

Mediterraneo103• 8 years ago

Only sad thing is perhaps some day we won't be able to have the fun of making contributions ourselves, if the big companies handle all that for us like Google does.

There will always be room for individual contributions, because there are things that the big corporations do not care about. For example, many hiking trails and agricultural tracks good for cycling are missing from Google Maps because they simply do not have a business case for those details. Yet they are on OpenStreetMap because when OSM editors actually walk or cycle those ways, they add them to OSM.

Another example is opening hours for shops. There are only three ways those can end up on the map: 1) the business itself adds them, 2) a large corporation is aware of them and adds them, or 3) an individual mapper copies them off the sign at the shop’s entrance. For a lot of small shops, only 3 is realistically going to happen.

orblivion5• 8 years ago

Yeah, it also crossed my mind that once the basic stuff is in place, it frees us up to add more of the niche interest stuff.

matt40772• 8 years ago

I'm pretty sure that Google Maps does auto-discovery of hiking and biking trails by simply watching peoples' positions?

At least I've had rather good experiences using Maps for biking. Even small, unofficial paths were mapped, and travel times indicated that Maps had an accurate idea of their condition.

Vinnl2• 8 years ago

Another example is opening hours for shops.

Unfortunately, the dominance of Google Maps makes 1) more likely to happen for them - more likely even than 3) is going to happen for OSM. Or at least, that's what my gut feeling says.

sidstling2• 8 years ago

Why wouldn’t it have a future? We use it quite a lot in the European public sector where we can’t use google maps because of privacy issues.

We’ve written a small app that does route calculations for us to make reporting business related driving (you get a refund, but that has to be taxed in specific ways) an automated process. We use OSM in that, but we do pay a company to do the routing algorithm and supply the data in a way that doesn’t abuse the standard OSM api. I’m not sure exactly how they do that, I think they host part of OSM or something like that. There is a big industry for small companies which are specialized in those things in Europe, and they are typically cheaper and easier to use than google.

We also rely heavily on OSM in our GIS department, where we have our own private maps, though they aren’t so much for traffic we have been building our own “street-view” thing, using OSM and our own 360 images.

The disadvantage of OSM is actually the submission process, like if a street is wrong, and you supply the correct information, it’s not always accepted right away. Which is a huge issue if you rely on it for something serious. That hasn’t been an issue for us for two years though, but we did have one week where an elected official couldn’t submit his driving because of a wrong one-way street.

kqr6• 8 years ago

The disadvantage of OSM is actually the submission process, like if a street is wrong, and you supply the correct information, it’s not always accepted right away.

In what way does this happen? I haven't experienced it yet and I get the impression my edits are accepted automatically. Is someone reverting your changes with no good justification?

rmc12• 8 years ago

if a street is wrong, and you supply the correct information, it’s not always accepted right away

I'm a long time OSMer, and I'm a little confused by this, because OSM is a wiki. There are no data controls. When a user makes a contribution, it's saved into the global OSM database straight away.

Can you explain more about what you've experienced?

rmc12• 8 years ago

Only sad thing is perhaps some day we won't be able to have the fun of making contributions ourselves, if the big companies handle all that for us like Google

There is some opposition within the OSM community from getting big tech corps to do all the work.

kerng• 8 years ago

This is great! Google has recently spiked fees drastically and it will be good to see more alternatives with high quality data

t0mislav• 8 years ago

Because of that I needed to abandon Google Maps Api. But good thing is I learned how to download OSM data, generate and host my own maps.

Moru2• 8 years ago

Yeah, me too :-) Just got it running yesterday on my devbox. Still thinking of hireing Geofabrik to set up the real server when I'm done though.

bepotts• 8 years ago

Are Apple and Microsoft's map services built on OpenStreetMap? Or are they just contributing for the heck of it?

Cursuviam• 8 years ago

Yes, they both are.

lucideer7• 8 years ago

Not originally, though Microsoft have recently added an OSM layer to Bing, and Apple have attributed OSM as being a contributor to their overall AppleMaps dataset in some parts of the world.

rainbowmverse• 8 years ago

Apple Maps lists a whole bunch of data providers. OpenStreetMap is among them.

mariushn• 8 years ago

Feel free to install on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapswithme...

or https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand.plu...

em3rgent0rdr2• 8 years ago

even better...don't need to use Google Play: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/

lucideer7• 8 years ago

also, the gp's first link (MAPS.ME) is available on FDroid as an open source fork with ads & blobs removed: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/

It also comes with some nice extra features added, but ymmv on the stability of those features

jaakl• 8 years ago

There is also some controversy around it : the big players do data mixing from different sources, which is not strictly compliant with OSM licenses. Also some say that their bulk editing creates nice map data, but harms local potential mapping communities, with early case of Netherlands where AND contributed map data resulted to no real manual map updates afterwards. So some say that community, not map must come first, so the “guerilla mapping” is bad.

lucideer7• 8 years ago

There is also some controversy around it

Do you have a link to some commentary on this?

I'm aware of MS's generated US building footprints[0] but this hasn't (yet) been integrated into OSM (largely I think due to quality and bulk-import etiquette worries). And also StreetSide[1] but this isn't imported into OSM itself, rather it's displayed as an aid for editors.

Facebook is looking at contributions similar to MS's US building footprints (but for roads), but again this is mainly around tooling and generation rather than data sources, and is speculative as far as I've seen.

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/USBuildingFootprints

[1] https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/5050

rmc12• 8 years ago

Do you have a link to some commentary on this?

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:AI-Assisted_Road_Tr... https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57942 https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=63456 https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57387

lucideer7• 8 years ago

This is great, but I'm surprised to see Apple featured so prominently in the title here alongside Facebook and Microsoft.

Apple has an internal volunteer programmer whereby employees can choose to spend their time contributing to OSM—part of employee benefits (which is nice), whereas Microsoft and Facebook are actually contributing mapping data the company has created/collected to OSM.

Furthermore, just 2 of the 3 listed companies are major sponsors of OSM events: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_of_the_Map_2018#Sp...

thinkingemote• 8 years ago

Apple now employee their own teams to do mapping

lucideer7• 8 years ago

Do you have a source? I'd be interested to look at the work they're doing.

Doctor_Fegg2• 8 years ago

just 2 of the 3 listed companies are major sponsors of OSM events

Don't assume that because a company isn't listed, it doesn't/hasn't contributed.

lucideer7• 8 years ago

Don't assume that because a company isn't listed, it doesn't/hasn't contributed.

That is the list of all sponsors for that particular event. Apple did speak at the event, though their talk[0] was the only one not recorded, photos were forbidden, and they uploaded no slides afterward. The topic was their employees' volunteerism.

[0] https://2018.stateofthemap.org/2018/T081-Working_with_the_Co...

donalhunt• 8 years ago

The missing maps (https://www.missingmaps.org/) project is very popular in CSR programs around the world even if it's a bit "mechanical turk" for tech crowds.

Even google employees have contributed to the project by running internal mapathons in conjunction with organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières...

Will be running some events in my current company in the coming weeks which will be fun!

yur3i__• 8 years ago

I want to try openstreetmap, whats the best client available for android? (Pref. f-droid)

Monkey0x9• 8 years ago

I use OsmAnd, it works great for me.

hoschicz• 8 years ago

MAPS.ME is the best one by a pretty fat margin, I'd say.

Map viewing is wonderful, the best I have experienced on Android. It's very fast and super detailed.

Routing has some issues. The estimates are way off, routing by bike means road bike (not MTB) and the voiceover speaks too early or too late.

43920• 8 years ago

I've had a pretty good experience with Galileo (https://galileo-app.com/) on iOS; it looks like there's an Android version that's fairly similar.

pymai2• 8 years ago

I use both osmAnd and Maps.me from the fdroid store.

Maps.me: https://f-droid.org/app/com.github.axet.maps

osmAnd has a ton of features. maps is more basic but is better for navigation since it has a 3d option

kqr6• 8 years ago

OSMAnd is rather powerful, and its UI is not intuitive at all before you spend some time with it, but it's what I've come to like.

hetspookjee• 8 years ago

For anyone interested in setting up their own OSM tile server + Nominatim geocoding: Here's an up to date docker image that is relatively easy to set up: https://github.com/drwitter/osm-tiles-docker

Great for maps in offline environments and/or querying without API limits!

Really think OSM is great.

richforrester2• 8 years ago

Our HR department wouldn't let me give proper feedback. Even though I've had some people that, with a little tweak to their knowledge, or a slight shift in thinking, could become great hires.

There's tonnes of candidates out there that just lack something small, or are slightly less ideal than someone else... yet still have all the raw talent and potential in the world.

But you can't always hire them because you don't have the resources to up-skill them efficiently. Or you need someone that can more readily contribute to a project.

I've certainly got some people in mind whom I'd love to contact as soon as I start at a different employer, to drag them on board if said employer had the resources to properly develop them.

Ah well.

confounded• 8 years ago

Wrong thread, perhaps.

richforrester2• 8 years ago

That's embarrassing.

andrewharvey• 8 years ago

Uber https://github.com/Uber-OSM/NewZealand plus many other smaller organisations have dedicated OSM teams contributing too.

xmichael999• 8 years ago

They could use some money and hardware... Currently the site loads

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LukeWalsh• 8 years ago

During a rotational program out of college I was the product manager at Facebook working on maps as the team led up to the first ML contributions to OpenStreetMap (https://2016.stateofthemap.us/how-can-ai-help-us-make-maps/). There's an interesting story about a large mistake I made that is interesting to share:

I started working on this project because I believe that map data should be open as did everyone else on the team. There was (and still is to some extent) a lot of skepticism about whether large corporations have the best interest of the map at heart - and what tools need to be put in place to make sure the quality stays high. It's pretty clear to me that there can be an alignment in goals because whether it's a company, person, or nonprofit everyone prefers accurate map data. The questions are about margins of error & OSM rightfully leans toward only extremely high confidence.

One good thing about Facebook joining in on updating the open map is resources are not much of an issue. Our team was able to just call up and purchase the rights to the satellite images we needed instantly. For quite some time we had working models that generated edits for roads that were missing from the map. Leading up to the yearly conference there was a question of whether we should present all of our findings to the community and see what they thought before making any edits.

No one on the team was willing to push the button on submitting any of our edits because we weren't sure if they were good enough and it would feel shitty to be the one who broke the relationship between Facebook & OSM. Beyond the software engineers even the people who were paid hourly to train the models became invested in believing it was important that Facebook reach a way to channel its massive resources into the project.

Eventually we all gathered up and I just pushed the button to contribute a random 1km / 1km square in Egypt (we'd already computed edits across the country accounting for over 100% increase but things could always get better). Then we waited. No one ever reached out so we started contributing a little more at a steady rate to see if anyone else working in the country noticed (including improving the original 1km / 1km box as the models improved).

We were testing the ML in some of the harshest conditions we could find (low contrast in the desert) so the research team started working on another model for India (winding dirt roads, lots of rivers, tree cover). All of our edits went through street-by-street human approval which was working but slow going since the number of people on the project could fit in a Facebook friend recommendation unit. After not receiving much contact in Egypt (the map community there is small) we received initial positive feedback from local mappers in India and decided to ramp up the speed of contributing which meant getting a war room in Menlo Park and rounding up a larger group of people to review the machine suggested roads.

I ended up gathering a few too many people and myself along with the core team was too hasty in communicating the quality bar for submission. We planned to shadow edits as the week went on to make sure the new members were up to speed but things unfolded much more quickly. Within a few hours we accidentally submitted a few bad roads. A local mapper noticed as he'd just driven the area on his motorcycle the day before. I immediately left a meeting where we were negotiating buying more satellite imagery and jumped on a bike back to the war room. No harm done, we had scripts ready to undo edits.

When I got into the war room things were more problematic. Quite a few of the new folks had made similar mistakes so we paused everything. There was now a small group of local mappers in an IRC channel worried about large scale vandalism (though they quickly realized that wasn't the case). They noticed the breadth of the edits and tracked down the accounts of most everyone in the room. The map community in India is one of the better communities but still a room of this many people making edits at a such a scale was unlike anything you'd normally expect since the ML made editing 10-100x faster than hand tracing imagery.

During the time when the local mappers believed this might be intentional vandalism they escalated to the global community. So that's how a large chunk of the OSM leadership found out Facebook was doing work on the map - some of our worst edits. Shit! It ended up not being so bad however. The entirety of the bad edits were reverted in a few minutes with oversight from the head of the OSM data working group. IMO the situation accidentally showed some of the OSM corporate contribution skeptics that even the worst case wasn't so bad & Facebook was definitely wanting the community in control of any crises.

It wasn't all thought through but it's quite interesting in retrospect how the engagement strategy panned out.

stereo• 8 years ago

Hi from the OSM data working group. Please don't do massive imports like this without discussing them first with the local community, and the global one if there's no significant local one.

The impact from the massive Facebook edit was more important, I think, and people are still very skeptical about whether massive ML mapping like this can provide value to OSM today. Announcing and discussing the edits first would have been better PR. Recovering goodwill will take a lot of time and effort.

Our guidelines prohibit undiscussed edits like these, and not only the ones that cause trouble. It is not respectful to the unpaid volunteers that cleaned up after this that LukeWalsh seems to think it was "not […] so bad".

Please see:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_Edits_code_of_...

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines

vanous• 8 years ago

So OsmAnd and maps.me look great. Is there an Android app which i could run to contribute traffic data flow and traffic events (accidents or obstacles on the road) like Waze does?

rmc12• 8 years ago

There might be 3rd party apps that do it, but OpenStreetMap doesn't store or support traffic data flow.

Maybe http://opentraffic.io/ ?

konsnos• 8 years ago

Someone mentioned it in the thread but I can't find who. There is https://openstreetcam.org that I haven't yet used but intend to.

rmc12• 8 years ago

Yahoo (remember them?) allowed OSMers to use their aerial imagery from 2007 till 2011. Microsoft has allowed OSMers to use Bing aerial since 2010, and to be honest, it's probably been the most beneficial contribution to OSM of the ones in the article.

Also, Apple gave a talk at SotM about "working with the community" and demanded that that talk not be recorded (unlike all other talks thre) or shared with anyone else. Hardly in keeping with the spirit of "openness".

Facebook's computer vision imports are of dubious use.

dingaling• 8 years ago

Indeed the Bing imagery is one of the greatest non-financial gifts ever given by a technology company, regardless of motives.

When I started working on OSM about a decade ago my area was a greenish blur on the photo underlay and everything had to be manually positioned from GPX tracks. It took hours to map a street and given GPS error margins it was never certain to be exact.

Now anyone can log-in and start tracing roads / paths / buildings and it just takes a couple of physical visits to backfill the enumeration and names.

sabas_ge3• 8 years ago

Just to point out that the Apple talk was not recorded due to the company wide policy. (I was at SotM) On the FB import you still think of the first import, but after that they worked a lot with the local communities.

mwexler• 8 years ago

Maps are not just roads. POIS, transit rails, pedi paths all play a role,esp in cities. And OSM does well with path data but it's POI data is disappointing compared to Google. Transit stations are in the data but no info about what lines serve them. For eateries or stores, hours, menu focus, parking data is often part of Google POIs but is missing from OSM.

All great reasons this data is not present, but that does limit OSM usage in a wide group of cases.

The data that is present, however, is wonderful.

andygates2• 8 years ago

One of the challenges there is POI freshness. A paying advertiser is going to be timely across the Googleverse.

seren2• 8 years ago

I do occasionally add opening hours to OSM but the interface is a bit clunky in id editor.

I would recommend using Street Complete, that has a really easy interface to add that kind of information to osm.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost...

It is in beta but still very useful, and does not feel like a beta (really stable)

tinus_hn• 8 years ago

It is quite strange to see that many companies compiling essentially the same dataset for themselves. If a proprietary map is not necessary for your strategy it may well make more sense to go with OpenStreetMap.

amelius2• 8 years ago

I wish they contributed to DuckDuckGo as well. Or perhaps the issue is that DuckDuckGo is not open-source?

detaro• 8 years ago

Microsoft provides the search index for DDG in the form of Bing.

amelius2• 8 years ago

Interesting. I wonder in what format the index is provided. (Hopefully then don't simply anonymize and forward user-searches to Bing).

anderspitman• 8 years ago

Is there anything OSM-based like gmaps with the ability to search for ie restaurants in an area, then get voice navigation to the location? Even something that lets you search for "McDonalds near this address" would probably be good enough for me to switch.

maxerickson6• 8 years ago

Sure, but how useful they are will depend on whether the data in your area of interest is decent or not.

OSMAnd and Maps.Me both have poi search and voice navigation.

How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Are Contributing to OpenStreetMap

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