It was not met well. I was (and still sadly am) subject to personal attacks by certain members of the OpenStreetMap community.
I don't know much about Overture Map, but standardization of tags, and a more sophisticated data model would both be very welcome, and make a map built on this data easier to work with.
More to the point, it's never been the technical issues that have held OSM back. Instead, as my post tried to point out- the technical issues stemmed from issues with leadership.
The post here mentions issues with the OSMF. At the time I wrote my post- the OSMF was largely symbolic, and certain community members simply held the key to certain aspects of the project- everything from servers, to software used, and more.
It was a huge mess, and I'm cautiously optimistic in seeing something new come around.
I remember reading your blog post a year or so ago when I was really starting to dive into OSM contributions and community. I guess I don't have much to say other than thank you for caring about the future of OSM (as many do) and writing your post. I'm sorry to hear you've been attacked!! I'm hopeful too that much needed political and technical changes will come eventually, even if late. Thank you for your contributions to the community and data.
There are reasons why the community leadership was poor. It had to do with both the culture of the project (being a grass roots project) and then a fear of change.
That fear came from lack of vision. Without a vision to to work towards, forces tended to see the best path forward as "No change", since no change is safest.
I hope that this new entity can do something good with this data, and use their vision to build something really great!
Very common, in any human community, but pure poison, in a technical one.
Insistence on structure, is often derided as “fear of change,” but it’s a very different animal.
Sorry to hear about your experience, but I have dealt with similar behavior. In my case, I’m actually a fairly cantankerous, stubborn bastard, and bulled my way through.
Just finished the article. Did I miss where the author answers the question what Overture Map means for the future of OSM, or it it rather meant to be an overview of the state of things for those not involved in OSM?
The article didn’t answer this, but hinted at a few possibilities (I’ll be checking out the Overture Map project to see if it’s possible to confirm any of these: more corporate friendly governance, different data model, additional standards for map features.
One way to gauge the impact might be to keep any eye on what Meta does with its Daylight Map Distribution project (a clean OSM), https://daylightmap.org/.
> “Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.“
Reading this sound very promising, but i can't stop thinking "Where is the catch?". I would love to trust this project and believe in the good, but looking at the companies that are overture members doesn't help at all.
The catch as I can see it is with the complexity and issues of combining OSM with a bunch of other data sources. This is what Apple used to do before shipping their own maps. Most of us remember some of the highly publicized issues that were associated with that. I also noticed that Apple, who is (was?) also a heavy OSM consumer, is conspicuously missing from this list.
Apple uses OSM in some countries (mainly “global south” like Africa).
OSM maps are superior to the new maps in some places like Australia, although maybe in irrelevant ways - there’s not really value in having every single building drawn on the map.
I think the catch is simply that the maintainers of OSM are difficult to work with if you’re Apple et al. They wanted a better governance model so they went and made one that they can live with.
It means nothing except that there will be more contributors and/because OSM data will make it into more projects.
OSM might also feel more pressure to standardize things like tags for features, which would resolve a considerable problem in using OSM data. Both tag names and value formats vary from region to region, and that's probably why almost any proprietary maps software is more useful than OSM apps. Having personally had to use OSM data, writing heuristics to parse tag names and values is a lot of work.
As for criticism of Overture on OSM community forums, there seems to be a lot of vague gesturing at "big tech bad, OSM community good." A more constructive place to look for what Overture means for OSM is the OSM Foundation's blog/press statement - https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2022/12/22/views-from-the-ope.... Which, to my mind, reads as saying that OSM data is free to use for corporations, but OSM hopes that Overture improvements flow upstream.
If my tone seems a bit negative, it's because I'm a bit tired of the negative reaction open source communities tend to have when being challenged or offered a collaboration opportunity with big tech. I feel like the approach Blender takes with big tech (like NVIDIA) is much, much more productive.
Free (and messy from data user perspective) tagging of OSM is not a bug but feature: the system is optimized for map creator. Maybe it is the main thing why OSM was (and is) success compared to many other crowdmapping attempts.
Sure map users now need to do cleaning and quality control, but this is always application-specific and cannot be forced to the mappers. I feel OSM balance between structure and freedom is good enough.
Now some map applications are quite standard: eg nice base map and navigation, so for these quite many companies have built own data cleaning/structuring/rendering stacks, where only some pieces are easily available as OS, rest is kept as business secrets. I hope Overture will provide usable OS full stack here. Certainly this will be also specific to the contributors own interests, and it does not try to “fix” OSM into well structured database.
Both tag names and value formats vary from region to region, and that's probably why almost any proprietary maps software is much more useful than OSM apps.
That's a pretty bold statement. There is certainly lots of variation in usage, but commonly used tags are used pretty consistently, the variation is largely in things that "almost any proprietary maps software" doesn't even bother with.
I don't think this is a bold statement at all. I agree with you about "pretty consistently", but that is not consistent enough for many uses.
Let's say I want my maps application to know whether a building is commercial or residential. Some buildings have building=residential, others have building=yes or building=oui, and others just have landuse=commercial (or landuse=residential, suburban, quarter, suburb, neighbourhood, or residential=yes, or residential=apartments). This is not the worst-case scenario; we can write an interpreting adapter for these tags. But somewhere in the world, there will be edge-case tags the adapter won't handle. And it is challenging to use that approach for applications that tens of thousands of users will see and scrutinize.
Zooming in on my hometown the buildings that I expect to be commercial are tagged as commercial, but on Google maps the same buildings are pretty inconsistently coloured. Are there other commercial maps that do a good job at that?
I don't know off the top of my head. But missing tags or mistagging is a slightly different problem than tags that are difficult to parse. What's un/mistagged can be corrected in a crowd-sourced way (as Google Maps is doing). What's challenging to parse continues to be so no matter how much crowd-sourcing is present.
The solution is straightforward for OSM - standardize the tags. It's been a long debate in OSM, but I hope the commercial influence will make them do it. There are practically no downsides and significant benefits.
I think it's good to recognize that both enterprises and individuals want to use and contribute to large projects like OpenStreetMap.
Overture's sponsors seem pretty focused around big company needs, like coordinating efforts between mapping orgs and standardizing metadata. They're each pledging $3M + 20 FTEs per year to accomplish it [1].
But I would argue it's more productive to coordinate enterprise+individual contributions through a central organization: the OSM foundation.
When io.js forked from Node.js in 2014, it was more of a call for attention than a desire to split the ecosystem in two. They merged the next year. (I joined the core dev team after the split.)
Maybe instead of asking what OSM will become after Overture, we should ask, why can't enterprises accomplish their goals within the framework of the OSM Foundation?
Disclaimer: my startup has a product built on OSM [2].
Yet another open {source|data|whatever} project is ending up with "Thank you, creative person, here's your exposure!"[1]
Isn't it a perfect business model for corporations?
1a) Launch an open source aka crowdsourced project at a relatively small cost, or 1b) Just wait until it comes out of the woodwork on its own.
2) Watch the data of interest flowing in, for free, in a self-organizing way.
3) Wait until it reaches the stage when bringing it up to a production-ready state takes again a relatively small investment, then take it over.
4) Now offset your small investments orders-of-magnitude-fold compared to what you would without crowdsourcing - by selling the data which people hand-picked and gathered for years, by training your AI on their code, by debugging a prototype of future blockchain money at the expense of enthusiasts and profiteers etc.
Would this work? Hell no, except maybe on Flat Earth! You forgot
0) To set the stage by preaching how noble and virtuous it is to give away the fruits of one's work away for free for the greater good, providing for a better future for all of us on the principles of freedom, predominantly as in beer, all over the Internet, especially in places where young and idealistic graze on the fields of IT.
I wonder why there isn’t a json file for map and other related details that could just be on each company’s website with location, hours, and other key metadata.
I would imagine a map equivalent of an RSS feed would be nice, although companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s files would probably need to be compressed due to the sheer number of locations.
I suppose some of that is supported by microformats.
The rest is supported by Google Maps and Apple Maps, where businesses can submit their location, hours, etc, and do that ASA matter of course.
The predominant pattern for a customer is to use a (really the) search engine, feed it the name of the business, and see the details in a snippet, or jump to a (really one if two) maps app.
I don't see what would be the upside for Google and Apple to interpret such files, instead of forcing business owners register with their sites, prove identity, contact info, etc, and keep them within their silo along the way :-(
Sure, it probably will hapgen and work, but it feels so wasteful to use AI when we could have just[0] had everyone post the information in machine readable format to start with.
[0] I'm aware that "just" having everyone converge on even a handful of standard formats is, in the real world, a high bar. I do think we could do it - yes, probably by Google applying pressure - but adoption remains Hard.
This is the sort of task where you start out saying “let’s use AI to do it” and then instead hire hundreds of contractors in Bangladesh. That’s how a lot of other maps features get there.
There’s an incredible amount of customer surplus in maps products. They’re all free, cost billions to make, and competitive enough to mean they keep improving.
The author is overstating how hard it is to get a full openstreetmaps export on your own system. Sure it’s a bit of work (may take a few days), but it’s doable on a consumer system with a large disk.
I’m excited about a group of people improving that process and the data storage format. I’m not excited about it being these people.
I'm looking forward to more technical detail of precisely what Overture Map intend to do.
I'm all for standardisation and collaboration improving the foundations of mapping data, but I reserve judgement about the scale of impact until I see more concrete detail.
FUD - pure FUD - hyperbole about the resources needed to use open street map data - most first world developers can afford a single system to work with address or map data for their whole country if not the world.
- things that work sooner or later will prevail, BUT only when some have found the way to overturn their functioning from "good for all" to "good for some, mostly against all the rest";
- the "free market" model of classic liberalism was built because those who have built it was LESS powerful than governments, then they successfully penetrate government, reach a certain level of power than their propaganda change back to the classic pro-governance propaganda, in software terms this is simple: before many pushed their proprietary model BUT when some succeed really others who do not can't destroy the new monopoly, so they turn to a mocked freedom move.
Google Maps is simply a proprietary de-facto monopoly, the only way to crush it is being better and the only way to being better is being open. The very thing they deny until the day before, then they falsely embrace to create their walled gardens, now the embrace more crushing the walls since they can't survive internally. Unfortunately people do not realize that.
I wrote a post on my blog about my concerns for the project, and some ideas for improvement:
https://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2018/02/16/osm-is-in-trouble/
It was not met well. I was (and still sadly am) subject to personal attacks by certain members of the OpenStreetMap community.
I don't know much about Overture Map, but standardization of tags, and a more sophisticated data model would both be very welcome, and make a map built on this data easier to work with.
More to the point, it's never been the technical issues that have held OSM back. Instead, as my post tried to point out- the technical issues stemmed from issues with leadership.
The post here mentions issues with the OSMF. At the time I wrote my post- the OSMF was largely symbolic, and certain community members simply held the key to certain aspects of the project- everything from servers, to software used, and more.
It was a huge mess, and I'm cautiously optimistic in seeing something new come around.