FYI, When I say OSM here, I mean the ecosystem of apps along with the core project. Not just open street maps website.
Let me start off by saying that Open Street Maps is a fantastic project helping a lot of people & organizations day in and day out. There is no doubt about that at all.
This is intended to be a review as a normal user & viewed from an angle of it replacing google maps eventually. I do understand OSM is a database first, but for the ecosystem to mature we’ll need a lively data source.
I’ve also been contributing to OpenStreetMaps, all the while pondering over how useful my contributions are (very similar thoughts to this post). As a contributor, to drive contributions it would be great to see a wall of fame for OSM.
But anyways, here are my thoughts on the ecosystem of OSM as a consumer looking for an alternative to google maps which uses OSM
If you are an iOS user, I would recommend using Organic Maps. Other alternatives include OsmAnd & Maps.me. If you are into editing the maps, I would recommend EveryDoor or Go maps!!
Extremely sparse Point of Interest data
The primary use-case as a maps user for me is to look up places like cafes, restaurants, pharmacies, ATMs, hospitals, parks etc..
Depending on where you are, this data is drastically out of date. Even popular places & parks are completely missing. This is mainly because OSM is community driven & there is not a lot of community in a particular place. This sucks from an end user perspective because this is the whole point of a maps for them. Roadways are also equally, if not more important but OSM seems to have good data around this.
Search needs a lot of improvement
This is probably the Achilles’ heel of OSM. In no app did I see a nice search bar with autocomplete ordered by relative distance popping up.
For example, from Andhra pradesh. If I’m searching for Catamaran (A cafe in allepy, because I just want to check open hours and call them up for some questions)
- Organic maps: first result is Catamarca in Argentina
- OsmAnd: no results
- Maps.me : first result is Catamarca
- Nominatim (the search powering openstreetmap.org) : One hit, the cafe. Bingo!
Some more examples, everyone is used to searching for “Cafes near me” or “ATMs near me”. None of the above apps show any ATMs around me if I run the same query.
This right here is what drives me nuts, consumer apps rely on search. Having a bad search engine is the single worst problem to have.
Missing user reviews, ratings with photos
This is not currently in OSM’s purview, understandably so. But there should be some integrations for apps like Organic Maps so that the quality of the place is evident. Say for example for restaurants, cafes etc..
A good web UI
A lot of times, I plan for trips and look up places on web. There is no good web UI for browsing OSM as far as I know.
Conclusion
I really want OSM to take off, I ran into OSM after knowing that Namma Yatri uses it extensively. Open data is core infrastructure and I strongly believe this should be open source.
But if someone in the ecosystem does not solve for this, we’ll never see the full potential of open mapping systems.
Talk is cheap, solutions?
Thanks for reading this far, I hope you see all this in good faith. I have a membership for OSM and now have a recurring donation. That’s my contribution on the financial side. Now let’s talk about the data side of things.
I believe more POI data is extremely important for more OSM adoption. I’ll start tackling that set of problems. Once the POI is setup, apps like every door, street complete and many others will start showing it on the app and people can start populating more granular data.
Here are some things I’m planning to work on or started working on
- OSMRocket (alpha): a small app to take in plain text info on lat long, open hours, amenity from people and convert it to OSM tags setup. I’ve used this to add more than 50 places in my city. I found it pretty useful.
- Scrape places with more than 100 reviews from google maps and make sure they are present on OSM. I have a script for this already, will furnish this as a project soon.
- A good self host able search engine with proximity for OSM. Similar to OSM nomination. something which supports plain text also so that atms near me has results and is lightweight. Maybe host it and give it as a free service to organic maps etc..
- An expo app which lets people click locate, speak into the mic and generate a osm card for poi using AI assistance. When pressed okay, adds it to a stack. Which will be later committed as a change set into OSM. A natural extension of OSM rocket.
What would be really be beneficial to the project. Most of the ideas here need funding, but solving anything at scale requires some capital investment
- Google’s exhaustiveness comes from the vehicles which go around with high accuracy gps attached to 360 degree cameras and LIDAR for depth sensing. This data is later used to track roads, point of interest data and many other things. This is probably the only way to add seed data at scale. Once this exercise is done, people can later enrich data further. This is a high capital investment, but once data is in place it’ll prove to be very useful