On Thu, March 27, 2008 1:33 pm, Christ van Willegen wrote: > Have you seen the progress that's been made in The Netherlands? > > i.e.: > http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.375&lon=5.24898&zoom=17&layers=B0FT > (yes, there are houses on there...)
It is very good. Presumably data from a Dutch publicly funded mapping agency has been uploaded into the OSM databases. By comparison if you zoom out an scroll south until you get to the border with Belgium, the situation is very different. Major towns are just dots on the map with perhaps the road thought the center but nothing else. The situation for France appears to be even worse. The motorway network appears to be complete, but much of the national trunk road network is missing, let alone most towns and local roads. If you attempted to use an OSM based satellite navigation system for a journey across France you would not get very far. What I am saying is that the OSM project looks promising and is a great idea, but without major contributions from big publicly funded databases it is only ever going to be a collection of small areas with good detail separated by vast areas where just major roads are shown. Unlike a software project like Linux the contributions from a few hundread talented developers will never be enough. Unless a public body pays for it, The only way for a particular town to get mapped is for an OSM enthusiast _in_that_town_ to spend a lot of their time recording routes along every street, and then editing it all together. I just don't think there will be enough enthusiasts do do that outside major university towns. -- David Pottage Error compiling committee.c To many arguments to function. _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
