What’s Wrong With OpenStreetMap?
At the rapidly approaching State of the Map 2010, I will be hosting a potentially controversial panel on the subject “What’s wrong with OpenStreetMap?”
A slightly risque look at the areas we think OSM is getting it wrong, and getting it right too of course. SotM is a big celebration of all things OSM, but there is a need to highlight issues that the community, the OSMF, and local chapters, should address.
With the geo world now all paying attention to OSM, just look at the sponsor list for this year, there are big challenges coming up – keeping community cohesion as OSM membership growth continues, the ‘IBM Moment’ – is OSM ready for a big commercial donation, how do we secure lasting funding for OSM, what on earth is going on with the licence, do we need paid staff like Wikipedia… etc etc
I’m looking for some questions to put to the panelists, so this is your chance to tell me “What’s wrong with OpenStreetMap?”
Christopher Osborne
Potential topics that I sometimes think about:
- Managing quality. Apparently Wikipedia (at least in Germany) didn’t get this right and upset a lot of people. How are we going to decide what’s relevant and how are we going to maintain the existent information to stay up-to-date.
- Usability. Like every other open source project OpenStreetMap has in general a horrible usability and user experience. That’s because a lot of the people who implement features only care about the ability to do something and not how to do this and it is because usability in general requires a lot of work and difficult, often even radical decisions. Even projects with usability teams like GIMP sometimes struggle to go forward. You can read more about this by searching the internet, but it’s still complicated
- Where is OpenStreetMaps place in the geo ecosystem? Being free isn’t enough to be relevant since Google and Nokia are doing the same now. The license keeps big commercial vendors away from using OSM as a key mapping component and map quality and coverage still is not always good enough. Should OSM just sit there and see what happens or should we try to actively innovate into a certain niche?
- The license. Most parts of the community probably don’t care and would be perfectly ok with PD. Commercial parties within the OSM community usually prefer share-a-like to keep competitors away. Please don’t talk too much about the license in your panel because everyone is either annoyed by it already or is getting militant into a certain direction.
That’s it for now. I know some parts above are a bit too much black and white, but I think you get the idea what topics might be or might not be interesting.
Nothing is wrong with OpenStreetMap. It’s the rest of the world we need to work on
Seriously, we need better outreach to people looking to use the data. There’s a whole world of map users who are stuck in their ways with desktop GIS software, or even stuck on google Maps API. We need to persuade them to move, but before that we need early adopters to help bridge the technical gaps, setting up services to make the transition to OpenStreetMap easier.
As an example, OpenStreetMap tagging structures, and the proliferation of weird tag values makes the data harder to use. But does that need to be fixed in OpenStreetMap itself? People with servers, who can engage with end-users, can set up services to filter and rationalise the data in ways which make it easier to use. We’re starting to see more and more attempts at making rendering software easier. That’s all helping to bridge this gap.
Hooeee, where do I start?
Practical thing: Documentation. Our documentation is world-beatingly terrible. It’s a spaghetti of badly written wiki pages, originally written by people who have never been a beginner in their life, and revised monthly by someone adding their own particular “YOU MUST NOT DO THIS” hobby horse. How on earth anyone ever manages to edit OSM beats me.
Philosophical thing: Not Being OpenStreetMap. Every 27 minutes someone comes along with a new ingenious way to not be OpenStreetMap and touts it as the answer to all our problems. So far today we’ve had insanely complex data models to solve barely existant problems, an attempt to impose a top-down, OSMF-directed vision, and major-league software promising “fed up with all this freeform collaborative stuff? Don’t worry, you can now stomp all over the community’s work from the comfort of your favourite GIS“.
Technical thing: The Free Map Doesn’t Have A Free API. The purpose of osm.org is to provide a means for people to contribute map data (API and Potlatch). People who want the data are invited to download planet.osm (or an excerpt) and do cool stuff with it. Great in theory. Unfortunately in practice half the world – particularly the half writing mobile apps – just wants to scrape map tiles or to hammer the API for read-only purposes. OSM doesn’t provide that, and we don’t have an easy answer to people who say “oh, well if you block me, I’ll just fake my UA/use Google Maps instead”.
Community thing: old farts like me who moan about anything new and believe it was much better when we were hand-etching segments onto the platter of a 40Mb hard drive somewhere in UCL.
@Harry…nothing wrong with people using desktop GIS….just as long as you keep pushing what you can do with it…we set up our own internal OSM tile rendering system and server and got Cadcorp to write us a plug-in so we could point it at the tile server. Usability of OSM is an issue for GIS users…currently talking to a supplier about hosting a uk set of data custom projected to osgb and served out in something like WMS format which can be plugged into just about anything then. Usability is the main barrier as I see it, especially in local gov where there are a lot of point and click users who run for the hills when you mention command line or tools like OGR etc!!!
Too many people want to fill the OSM database with data imports. Let’s only import data that really improves OSM and that is of the highest quality. Let’s not import data of poor quality just to help fill blank areas, especially if the data is something that can readily be gathered on the ground.
From a corporate point of view.
How can I “pay” or “incentivise” completion/coverage in areas I am interested in?
How can I facilitate/initiate capture of attributes I need?
How can i get clarity on the license and what I can do with the data?
etc etc
Tagging – the lack of any means of democratic decision making due to a blind faith in the wiki anarchism not shared by any other major open source community leads to daft ambiguities like path / footway. These make maps and the data less usable.
Harry is right about outreach but wrong about making them come to us.
To add to others usability points, the many tools to check data for common faults, differences with public data, missing data, etc. vary in quality and are spread all over the place.
And yes, after five years I miss blank spaces!
When I say we want to persuade people using GIS software or google Maps API to move, that’s not really what I meant. I mean persuade them to use OpenStreetMap data, and make sure they feel able to do that easily in whatever system they’re comfortable with. And the point I’m making is, there’s nothing at the core of OpenStreetMap which needs to change to make that happen, but there’s lots of work to do in the periphery. Happily that’s the way the wind is blowing anyway, but we should get more organised about it. Actually an OSGB projected WMS service is perhaps the best concrete I was already of thinking of before you said it James. Very interested to see how that goes.
I can see that this panel discussion could end up being very philosophical: The evils of “top-down control” versus the difficulties of “blind faith in the wiki anarchism”. All quite interesting. I imagine Chris may have to work to keep the discussion anchored to real problems users have.
Assuming Chris makes it off the stage in one piece after the panel is over, I’d love to see these points covered:
Is OSM Finished?
Is OSM Just About The Map?
To Fork Or Not To Fork?
The Unfortunate License Question?
Too much to cover in a comment so these points are fleshed out in a post over on my blog – http://vtny.org/9C
Shame I won’t be at Girona this year … this will be a humdinger of a panel to participate in and to watch.
The idea of forking off something which is truth if looking at ODbL…
Losing data and very active contributors for gaining an untested new license which moves more rights to a not trustworthy osmfoundation…
Stupid**2
The leadership is exactly what the project needed in 2006. Discuss.
Perfect, this is going to complete anarchy
The points I would love to see covered are around the topic of usability.
- i think OSM needs a kick arse web interface to show case the power of the OSM data, the kind to compete with the Google Maps to allow folk to search the rich local information OSM has captured.
- someone else mentioned this above, usability of the editors also needs attention
- usability of the data via an api needs attention. cloudmade’s api is a good example but they are commercial organisation and i think OSM needs an api of its own to provide that usability layer
I think usability in these aspects is key to growing OSM beyond the geo geeks to being an option on the table whenever people sit down to discuss their mapping needs in organisations around the world.
Good luck Chris, hope the discussion is fruitful.
See the wiki page SotM 2010 session: What’s wrong with OSM? Panel discussion for post-event links to videos / write ups / blog responses
Currently there’s a video shot by Ikiya, but I believe there should’ve have been a video with better sound quality recorded by the venue people (not released yet, but maybe one day)