On 17/12/14 14:52, Adrian Custer wrote: > You may be mixing two different ideas: overall data quality versus > specific data errors. Curating involves making sure that small > errors don't ruin the rest of the data; it is not a data gathering > effort at all nor a comment on the overall data quality of a data > set. Sometimes a single small street is connected in a strange way to > a major autoroute or even to a train track or something similar and > that tiny error leads to huge visual or algorithmic problems. > Curating involves inspecting the data and correcting these tiny > errors that have big impacts. This ends up being critical when doing > routing, or address matching, or other advanced mapping stuff and > sometimes even in simply rendering the data.
Do you know much effort goes exactly in this kind of QA around OSM? Czech community just starts with http://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/cs/map/ but it is by far not the only system of discovering exactly this kind of bugs. A lot of fun is with http://maproulette.org/, completely addictive if you are into such stuff. And yes, my conclusions about quality of here.com v. OSM v. Google Maps are based on many attempts to use both for routing. Quality of routing varies for ALL maps, but quite strongly OSM and Google are almost always way above Nokia Maps which generates sometimes very wild routes (500+ km route from Prague to Krakow, which suddenly goes in the middle through a unpaved cart track is probably the top achievement). Yes, they have some traffic information which is useful (contrary to OSM). And it is not only in Czech republic ... in rural Italy, OSM is consistently best for routing (way ahead even of Google). Nokia Maps have most of the three most outdated maps (missing cross-roads, road extenstions, etc.). > Right. There are two different things going on. First is a simple > map widget that shows tiles. Second is getting a blob of actual data > and being able to render or to do analysis on that data. The first is > vastly easier than the second. However, both require a web service > willing to furnish FirefoxOS devices in general with either tiles or > prepared data---a non-trivial investment. And the third is actual vector data covered by ODbL. Which is what I meant. > As for the apps you mention, lantea-maps for some reason is using > the OSM tile servers directly, which may or may not be legal. I > suspect osm-viewer is doing the same, though have not seen its source > code. Both are probably under the radar enough not to matter. That was my point. There is an opportunity to develop your map for free, and only when it becomes popular (if it becomes popular) you have negotiate with OSM some resolution of your situation. > In a general solution aiming to make FirefoxOS rock, if Mozilla were > to take on this role, it could ensure a free of charge and free of > registration barriers access to map data for all apps on the device, > along with free software code able to evolve and grow. Actually this doesn't *require* modular design of Firefox OS mapping software (of course, it would be helpful if some mapping source module would be part of the Firefox OS system itself). It could be a tremendous help to the situation of mapping applications, if Mozilla just provided a tile servers etc. for free for anybody developing and deploying FxOS-compatible mapping applications. Is this Mozilla-provided data source what you had on mind? > Unfortunately, this work involving data management, setting up > services, developing code, extending the IPC system, and building > user apps, is unlikely to happen. The need to monetize the work > conflicts with the goal to having a fully open, freely licensed > mapping service, code, and application. Mozilla, which could take on > this work, has other priorities. So, despite the usefulness to users > of having a mapping app and having a mapping service available to > any other app that wants it, I suspect mapping is not going to happen > on FirefoxOS in this way. You actually start to persuade me. My Flame fell on the floor other day and the glass broke. So, I have been thinking about buying new phone. After reading your messages you have mostly persuaded me, that if I want a decent phone (better than your average $25-phone), I have to buy Android in the end, because FxOS will never provide decent service (and yes, decent phone for me includes an equivalent of OSMAnd). It is sad, but you might be right in the end. Perhaps FxOS is really only about “phones for Bangladesh” and even decent HTML5-apps are better served via Fennec on Android. Best, Matěj -- http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej/, Jabber: [email protected] GPG Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB 25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC <"}}}>< _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
