On 3/27/08, David Pottage <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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 >
I disagree. At the moment, very few people have GPS equipped devices. This will change rapidly in the future as GPS chips become the next thing being put into every mobile phone. I am sure that Open Streetmap will start to grow as fast as Wikipedia, then, and soon be unbeatable in being up-to-date and complete. Just look at how fascinated people were and are with Google Earth! If it's pretty easy for them to contribute, many will. At this point I don't worry about how complete OSM is. I worry about how I can contribute to make it more complete! Sounds like it's already possible to gather data for it with the Neo. I'll start asap. Ortwin _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
