I was once on a trip in Åndalsness, one of the most scenic places in Norway. Fjords, mountains, you know it.
On the walk to our cabin, a little outside of town, I was checking something on OSM, might have been just learning to use it and read it (it has some learning curve when switching from G-maps).
To my surprise, I saw a shortcut/walking path exiting from the road we were walking on. Already used such paths twice that day for a nice shortcut that didn't show up on G-maps. But there was nothing there.
I told my friend that I'd like to check what this strange hacker map is showing. When we looked again, we noticed that there actually was a trail uphill, what at first sight seemed to just be a forested hillside.
As we went up, the trail started to be more evident. We climbed for a couple minutes, went past a cabin with no road leading to it (pretty normal in Norway), and a few more minutes after it we arrived at a semi-top, with a big boulder and a picturesque view out from that viewpoint.
Very cool memory on the last day of the holidays, made possible thanks to somebody marking that trail on OSM.
Found it! It's on the southern exit from the Mjelva village. Viewpoint is not marked. It felt like a quite a private place, so I don't really want to post more details.
You're right. Last holidays, I went to beautiful place in Spain. A way covered in Ferns was marked as an OSM path. I guess it was, but did not get cut this year or the later. So we tried and failed 30 m after.
It's important to keep some mysteries despite precise maps.
That's why I'm at the same time fascinated by 3D "splats", but also worried to be spoiled.
They're great for places we already know (inspect your roof's shape for instance), but they spoil discovery.
I used it to reconstruct a 3D mesh of a bouldering wall. It worked perfectly. No gaussian splatting involved. I think the boundary between virtual and real world does get thinner by the day
I got into OSM and StreetComplete to flesh out intersections, stop signs, and sidewalks in my area. I always felt like I was doing something wrong though. I created crosswalks, then OSM would prompt me to connect the crosswalk to the road via a crossing. In StreetComplete, it felt like I was filling in duplicate data. I had to add whether the crossing had crossing lights not only at the middle crossing, but on the sides as well. This probably doesn't make any sense.
Basically, I am never confident I am editing OSM correctly. Am I supposed to manually draw out sidewalks, or tag the road as having a sidewalk? After adding sidewalks in my area, StreetComplete is now asking me if roads have sidewalks, which I clearly see on the map. Reminds me of editing the various Wiki pages. There's several ways of documenting something, only one way is correct, and it's undocumented.
edit: after playing with StreetComplete more, I noticed you can mark sidewalks as displayed separately. This is tagged as "sidewalk:both=separate" on the road. Whether this is the right way to do things I do not know
Usually in OSM there are several different ways to map things, to varying levels of detail. (E.g. As you discovered, you can just tag a road as having sidewalks, or trace out the actual sidewalks themselves.) Generally, as long as the information you're adding is accurate, you're helping. Changing tagging schemes later is a lot easier than re-discovering that information from scratch. If you're really concerned, usually the wiki has good information on what is currently considered best practice.
Incidentally, I think for crossings StreetComplete now only asks about the actual crossing nodes, so no more duplicate quests.
> think for crossings StreetComplete now only asks about the actual crossing nodes, so no more duplicate quests.
It can be confusing for roads where both sides are separated or where there is a traffic island in the middle. There you have two crossing nodes (and sometimes even the footway leading over the road). But in general, I think it is very hard to actually cause trouble with StreetComplete. Furthermore, not every single quest has to be answered, although they typically only exist if there is an obvious correct answer the vast majority of the time (to not annoy users).
When in doubt, look for adjacent localities and do what the others are already doing. OSM is chaotic and (usually) driven by consensus that can be slightly different in specific communities.
The first time I tried using OSM's web UI to add stuff, my head was spinning. Bless you folks who do the intersections, speed limits, and whatnot.
I've mostly stuck to using Organic Maps to add individual businesses, that's a very easy thing to do. Drop a pin, name, phone number/website/hours/whatever, submit.
I discovered that recently, it's a very fun way to contribute to OpenStreetMap, and the UI is really well-done, it's totally beginner friendly!
I wish there was a way to do more than labeling though, like add simple roads and footpaths
I have used it one (1) time in my life, ans it was my first experience with OpenStreetMap in general. It was pretty fun!
It's very intuitive and makes you learn just how detailed and specific map data can be. Can't say much about missing features since I don't event know what can be done.
Recommended experience, it's like playing Pokemon Go without the evil part :)
Then again you produce public open-source data when you contribute to OSM, and nothing prevents the military from using it for morally questionable purposes... at the end of the day the only difference is the intermediary that could make a profit selling the data, no?
No, the huge difference is creating the good part. Where is the open data for the general public created from Pokemon GO? You can't stop the military using open data but that is on them. The evil is them getting your private data to have an exclusive advantage people have no control or transparency over.
I was talking about a difference for the bad outcome in this case... if Pokemon Go was open souce and public, the military could have done the same, for that matter the might be doing the same with OSM data to some extend right now and it would be harder to know about it.
Open-source software and data are obviously public goods I support. I was just pointing out that the only "evil" parts here are rent seekers reselling this data and the military... not the people assembling the data (players).
I was questioning the qualification of Pokemon Go being "evil" here, it's the data broker and the military who are evil in this case in my opinion. (Making it open-source also doesn't help, as I said we'd only short-circuit the intermediary who sold this data).
Maybe it's a useless nuance, but I don't think Pokemon Go gamers should feel/evil or even that they should be careful the next time they try to entertain themselves.
Usually if I need to add a footpath I use the "Create new track recording" feature to trace out the path with GPS, then come back to it later on desktop. Adding paths is pretty awkward to do on mobile, especially since there's no satellite overlay.
Strava doesn't have complete coverage, especially on newer trails, but more importantly: doing the trace via Street Complete attaches it to an OSM note with an optional (but encouraged) photo. This additional context makes it a lot more useful for editors than an ordinary trace, which can just as easily be an actual trail, a desire path, or someone deciding to improvise a shortcut through some brush. Even if the note just contains the word "trail", that helps us (though more detail is greatly appreciated, of course).
Though if you like StreetComplete and want aerial/satellite, there's SCEE, a fork of StreetComplete. I tried both Vespucci and EveryDoor, but neither is nearly as easy to use in my opinion.
Great app. There is also https://every-door.app/ that gives you slightly different set of tasks and allows you to place POI easily. I recently mapped a lot of trash cans and benches around my neighborhood while walking with my dog.
StreetComplete lets you place trash cans and benches too (among other things) using the "Things" overlay. IMO Every Door has a much more complicated UI, though it's also more of a full featured editor than StreetComplete. (Though still less so than something like Vespucci.)
Is that a new feature? I have over a thousand contributions on StreetComplete (casually using it during walks) and somehow I never noticed that button.
The overlays are intentionally a bit hidden, since they're more of a power-user feature and I appreciate that StreetComplete retains beginner-friendliness as a core tenet. But the overlays are indeed awesome for survey-type walks where you just want to make sure that all sidewalks are mapped correctly, or to see which shops are still missing.
The UX is really bad. POI loading is taking 10+ seconds to update, then any zoom or pan reorders the list of locations. Most of the missing info (around me) is just phone numbers and hours of operation, which are boring and should be trivial to collect automatically.
The thing is that the best way to get the phones and opening hours is to walk in person and look them up. Any source for the automated collection is way more likely to be outdated/wrong than what the sign or the person behind the counter tells you. And can also have non-permissive license not compatible with the OSM license.
Raw Information cannot be licensed, and I am not sure why OSM sticks to the policy that it can.
Google Maps does not hold the rights to which opening hours Bob's Bakery keeps. If someone entered them from Bob's Bakery their site onto Maps, you are free to type it off of Maps onto OSM. Legally anyway. OSM themselves still hold the policy you can't, so you should adhere to that.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google’s lawyer army could explain to some Google-paid arbitrator how it’s in their interest to find that such behavior violates Google’s database copyright under legislation of Google’s choosing.
It sucks that Google is probably using OSM data to check what they are missing and adding it to their maps, but we can't do vice versa. OSM should change their license to something like if you use our data, you have to make yours open as well.
Maybe I am misunderstanding the summary, but it says: "If you publicly use any adapted version of this database, or works produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL." <https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/>
For example, if I use Google Maps to drive to a new neighborhood and then take a bunch of notes about the new neighborhood, my notes are not subject to the terms and conditions of Google Maps.
Yeah the problem is what's considered an adapted database. If it was strict it would mean apps like Alltrails (which is 90% openstreetmaps data) would need to list their trailmaps as open databases, but they don't.
The problem is that factual details aren't copyrightable in the first place, so no amount of licensing will prevent organizations with enough money to pay a lawyer from understanding this and using the data as they see fit. And on the flip side, those organizations can pay those same lawyers to write scary boilerplate to make it seem like their map data is “proprietary” and therefore “protected by copyright” even though it isn't.
I know that's the common story, but I have never seen any actual court cases confirming that theory; certainly the recoverable damages from such copying such an error would be minuscule.
> It sucks that Google is probably using OSM data to check what they are missing and adding it to their maps
If only. Maps are still super broken around where I live. I personally mapped everything in OSM (which thankfully is used by most third party services these days) a couple years ago, but Maps is still people's primary source for routing and traffic related stuff.
As evil as they are, it's hearting to see the delivery platforms are embracing OSM when they could probably afford to just pay for Google's Maps API.
It gives hope that Google/ESRI won't always be the dominant mapping platform, however OSM is still missing a lot of local businesses which the delivery platforms don't need as urgently as house numbers so there's less focus there.
> It gives hope that Google/ESRI won't always be the dominant mapping platform
Are they? I get the impression that only consumer-facing stuff is Google, to give people a familiar color scheme¹ as well as allow terribly formatted search queries to still work (if google can do one thing it's search). However, anything using geo data in a back-end fashion seems about evenly split between government base maps, OpenStreetMap, and a collection of misc providers that Google is one of
¹ conversely, I struggle to find my home town on Google Maps. It's all about vague, washed-out shapes, besides the bright shop icons and, nowadays, advertising pins. It's a matter of what you're used to so I can very much understand that the average consumer, who's less familiar with maps than me, is totally lost when getting Carto as a map
Many companies do. Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, TomTom, Über, Komoot, VKontakte; I see German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish local governments mentioned; Austrian emergency dispatch; USA school bus operator...
It's more surprising at this point that Google isn't getting in on the fun, at least taking the good bits and calling their own data a 'separate layer' so they don't have to contribute anything back. (And of course no Chinese companies, since accurate maps are illegal there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...)
On the other hand, I've been trying to submit changes to Google for several new and vacated roads for over a year (having already updated OSM) and they are constantly rejected. I suspect it is much more that their updates are responsive to car traffic. The segments I'm submitting are or were low-traffic although they include a road that a local municipality has directed people to in official communication for overflow yard waste after some big, recent storms.
I had a similar experience with Google Maps, I used to live in a place where the house on Google maps was located on the wrong street, like one parallel street off.
I put in a few requests from time to time because deliveries were a huge pain, to no avail.
I opened a thread on some Google forum or support place and then it was mentioned that I actually can't change that because only the city is allowed to... why I get the option in the app I don't fully understand.
At some point it got fixed but I have no idea why. Of course it was a few months before I moved out
Google can cheat a little, especially for new roads since they notice when someone is driving over it. When there was a redesign of an intersection near here, someone marked the road as completed in OSM maybe half an hour after it was opened (we have a few quite active mappers), and Google had it open about two hours later and I suspect no one changed the data directly.
Waze definitely does this[1]. As a map editor, I can mark a road segment as closed and it will stay closed for as long as I say, unless reverted by another editor or traffic is observed moving through that closed segment (based on parameters that they set).
This kind of cheating usually works extremely well, from my observation.
Anyhow, Google owns Waze and data goes back and forth between there and Google Maps. They're like two heads of the same snake, so it's implicit that the same thing also works on Google Maps.
Reminds me of when Microsoft released a new Flight Sim, and people immediately started spotting buildings and things that were out of the norm in the game, which in turn started getting reported to OSM for corrections.
I've been mapping out shops, their contacts, cuisines (for restaurants), opening hours etc in my area. It's a lot of work and much of the information will actually simply not be available to me without a shop owner. So I'm trying to get some of them to update their own shop information. But I'm really struggling to find good arguments. Small shop owners often have quite stressful days already and taking even five minutes to update some information only makes sense if I can present them with a case that this will help their business.
Does anybody here know of ways that OSM data is used and products that people actually use to find businesses? I have heard rumors that Apple pulls data from OSM every now and again in areas where their own datasets are sparse. But do we have anything more meaningful or more concrete that would work in an area like France where data is not necessarily sparse in Apple's maps? (I'm saying this looking at Google Maps here in southern France where half of the shops that it displays just don't exist anymore for years...)
> So I'm trying to get some of them to update their own shop information. But I'm really struggling to find good arguments.
I did that for my business (a bakery). Spent ages on it, put in all the details I could think of. At the end of the process there seemed to be a requirement to send it you review so I did that. This was several months ago (probably six months), and it's never showed up.
I'm busy, and I have a thousand more useful things to do for my business. I'm very unlikely to try again.
On the other hand, if the process had been easier I'd probably have then gone on to adding other businesses in the area.
The actual business is listed, but with a slightly wrong name. But I can put that exact slightly wrong name into the search on openstreetmap.org right now and there's zero results.
Then I can manually zoom to the location (which is correct), see my business, tap on it... And nothing. It doesn't open. So given all of this, why would I bother with openstreetmaps as a business owner?
Yep, both of those things actually happened, what's your point? I'd love to say we were just unlucky but unfortunately I think it's par for the course when running a small business these days. At least when I was researching how to fix these I found a lot of other people with similar problems and a while industry of YouTubers and bloggers claiming to show you how to fix it.
We got back on Google maps after a few weeks and haven't had any problems since. We never got back on Instagram and had to make a new account, although to be honest we've barely used it since our business pretty much all comes from Google maps.
Are there other similar apps to stimulate soft "crowdfixing" ? I'm sure there are plenty of other aspect of society that would benefit from a light way to know where someone can contribute or notify so other can fix things (forest dumps, random trash). Homeostatic apps to ensure our surroundings are close to a good state :]
My city had a very vanilla, but very useful mobile app for submitting problems like missed trash pickup or dead traffic lights.
Someone apparently decided it needed to be "more modern", making it nearly unusable for quick reports like traffic light problems while I was stopped at the light. Every page was a separate request to a server, slow JS, etc.
They've since improved the flow and performance, but it still asks me for contact information before I can submit it. Fortunately they haven't started server-side validations yet, so I can still submit bogus info.
Just let me tell you your traffic light is out! Why is this so hard?
ah yeah pretty common and pretty annoying.. either they had to avoid false issues or maybe there was a regulation forcing the use of a more beefy system (or maybe someone thought it's "better" to use the latest shiny thing)
That is true, that said reporting is not the same (imo) as having a global map of problems and proposals to fix some of them. To me it's a lot more engaging (again, imo) as you see the distance to a goal.
hmmmm .... this prompted me to visit google street view in an area I lived in for 5+ years. When I was there it was a homeless haven. Hundreds of tents and hundreds of people lived there. Now when I go back and look at all the old photo dates, all the homeless have disappeared, as if they were never there. But the homeless were there when I was there.
It's easy to blame Google, but then again they kept a record of what they did and you can see it for yourself.
Just downloaded and made 15+ small contributions in the vicinity of my area. Very well built app. Super simple to use. And gamification is top-notch. Recommended.
I naively thought that Duolingo's gamification was for a good cause, helping you learn a language by addicting you, but now I know it's not only an extremely ineffective way to learn a language, but they're an advertising/social media/data broker company, which makes the gamification unethical.
I wonder if there are any other FOSS apps or websites with gamification that are for a good cause, like StreetComplete.
> an extremely ineffective way to learn a language
thats only if you use duolingo exclusively without things like reading news in the language (which is common unfortunately).
its a problem with their specific design using a weird hybrid of spaced repetition with traditional separate lessons. you only learn a couple words for each section but if they decide you know a word they never repeat it again so its easy to forget.
if they made it harder with more open questions and removed combos/perfect lessons to compensate it would be a lot more effective. non linear with multiple paths would also be great, like you decide you want to learn more grammar so you click on that instead of vocab exercises.
the addictive and social pressure parts are the whole point. its giving people motivation to learn and well designed interactive tools are always better than passively reading textbooks [1]. even the ui is made with lots of animation, colors, positive messages to make you feel good every time you get something right.
if streetcomplete added daily progress bars and fireworks every time your edit gets accepted it would probably have a lot more users. ive actually been thinking about making a new anki frontend with this type of addictive ux. that would be more effective and more general than duolingo but lose some of the features like open questions. would need to integrate a llm to fix that.
In my opinion, gamification that makes one addictive is very unethical.
So, any measure that aims at keeping users engaged (as the duolingo icon for example) should be viewed cautiosly.
Also, specifically with apps with which people provide real data, the more they see it as a game, the more the system will be gamed. When users start to guess, without really confirming it on-site, this leads to outright incorrect data.
What's fine, in my book, is to make the experience more gratifying, more "fun". That's probably what you meant, with firework animation etc..
The progress bars however already fall somewhat in the former category.
By the way, edits are accepted immediately. There is no verification step by the community (just like in wikipedia), all the more important it is that people don't start seeing it as a game first and as a way to contribute to a libre map second.
OSM is fantastic. I wanted a free, unencumbered map that matches the site's theme for ride sharing, billeting, and the venue location. The solution wasn't trivial, but at least it was possible. Couldn't imagine doing that with Google Maps.
This is very cool, I wish there was some way to use it on a bicycle though. For example, when moving into a street it could ask (using voice) if this street is paved, and I could answer it using voice too.
Is https://keepright.at still a thing? That used to be my go-to site when I was bored and wanted to find things to fix in OSM. No matter how much you fix, it seems that when you go back to that site, there seem to always be tons of stuff flagged for fixing.
One thing missing on osm is pictures. Would defeats Google maps if it had some, where users would feedback and bad shots would get wiped to save space. We would get the best shots the world has to offer.
In the app I'm developing, cartes.app, we acknowledged this lack of pictures.
We show local Wikimedia common pictures, osm tag pictures, og:image pictures of the website if any, Wikipedia article infobox pictures, Panoramax for street-view, and last but not least, any picture dropped by an ATproto place review.
Lots remain to be done, especially building the latter community of reviews.
I had been using mapcomplete to add images of artwork, which in turn used panoramax. However I saw someone else use Wikimedia Commons, and to me that makes more sense. Wikimedia ties into more systems, so if you wanted to create a Wikipedia page about an artist, there will be readily available images to use.
On the flip side, panoramax can be used as an open source StreetView. Different sites for different purposes I suppose
Wikimedia Commons also requires more up-front work by the uploader to categorize the image properly, which can be daunting if you're new to how things are organized there. But yeah, for well-known objects, adding Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons links can be awesome and there are plenty of apps making use of it to show additional information.
I think the reasoning behind this is that ideally you're at the location where you can confirm what you see, instead of maybe referring to older media or from memory.
That being said, I agree with you and would like to see more ways to access the tool!
You can edit OSM from its main site [0], although there's a much steeper learning curve when using the site (as you have far more freedom and it's not super easy to figure out the standard way to tag some situations).
Adding to that: StreetComplete specifically creates only quests for information which must be checked in the terrain like opening hours, surfaces, traffic light sounds. Anything surveyable from maps and other sources should be edited using the web editors. OpenStreetMap iD is probably the easiest to learn.
As in can you add points of interest like shops? Yes, there's a places overlay with an add button, and a things overlay for things like benches, bicycle parking, etc. For adding buildings, roads, or paths you'd need something else.
Thank you for the reminder! I got out of the habit of checking StreetComplete since my previous neighborhood was well populated in OSM, but having just moved, I should check it out again.
StreetComplete is cool, fun and useful, yes. And there is its companion app StreetMeasure which makes it easy to add measurements like the width of a narrow street, for example.
I agree! It seems like their work on the iOS app would bring them a lot closer to web app support as well. In the iOS tracking issue, they say the main changes are moving to Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, which both support web as a target.
Well, sort of. That'd be very bluesky. What's closer, actually, would be a desktop version, or rather, a version for Linux mobile like postmarketOS (would run like a desktop app in a JVM, but for a mobile target, the layout and UX wouldn't need to be changed.
Wherever you are and need to wait for a minute, there are quests to be solved there.
I recommend SCEE for those who are already familiar with OSM mapping or are in an area where the most common tasks are already covered: https://github.com/Helium314/SCEE
I enjoyed the simulated phone screenshots, particularly the choice of House of the Trembling Madness, a great beer stockist and drinking establishment on Lendal in York. I would like to think that the name in the input field is deliberately slightly wrong, ready to be fixed by someone. (It's "House of the Trembling Madness" rather than "The House of Trembling Madness".) Gamification at another level :-)
Been using this for my dog walks too. There's something oddly satisfying about turning a boring loop around the block into "wait, does that bin have a lid?" Never thought trash cans would be the thing that got me into mapping.
On the walk to our cabin, a little outside of town, I was checking something on OSM, might have been just learning to use it and read it (it has some learning curve when switching from G-maps).
To my surprise, I saw a shortcut/walking path exiting from the road we were walking on. Already used such paths twice that day for a nice shortcut that didn't show up on G-maps. But there was nothing there.
I told my friend that I'd like to check what this strange hacker map is showing. When we looked again, we noticed that there actually was a trail uphill, what at first sight seemed to just be a forested hillside.
As we went up, the trail started to be more evident. We climbed for a couple minutes, went past a cabin with no road leading to it (pretty normal in Norway), and a few more minutes after it we arrived at a semi-top, with a big boulder and a picturesque view out from that viewpoint.
Very cool memory on the last day of the holidays, made possible thanks to somebody marking that trail on OSM.
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