Curious, I went to look at Pyongyang on Google Maps. Here is what I saw:
That's not bad. Perhaps there is indeed a community of citizen cartographers at work there, as Google claims. This got me to thinking about the crowd-sourced, Wikipedia-like map project, openstreetmap.org (or: OSM). So I decided to see what Pyongyang looked like there:
The level of detail is extremely impressive, and it only gets better as one zooms in further. You can see this for yourself at BBBike.org's Map Compare tool.
Yes, OSM does not have streetview, but using OSM via KDE's Marble mapping software I get great 2D maps complete with routing and other bells and whistles. Best of all, OSM never tells me I can't download a certain map for offline usage as Google Maps often does.
After viewing Pyongyang according to OSM, I couldn't help but feel that CNN had missed the real story here, had mistaken a corporate effort for a community one and missed out on telling the world about the real Wikipedia for maps.
Media coverage is one thing, but what would be truly news worthy, and good for humanity (which is a step up from simply doing no evil), is Google adopting OSM for its data sets. Yes, it would probably keep its advertising APIs and streetview and what-not to itself, but at least the world would be one step closer to having a shared and collaboratively maintained canonical source for maps.
If nothing else, Google would get a much better map of Pyongyang.
6 comments:
With different cities, different experiences...
In the city I live(Chisinau, Republic of Moldova) it is very good: http://mc.bbbike.org/mc/?lon=28.86776&lat=47.0454&zoom=15&num=4&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-map&mt2=yahoo-map&mt3=bing-map
It shows even the paths through the park. That's because the University of Technology did a few sessions on completing the map, sent students out to improve the map.
But in the city where I study(Iasi, Romania) it is not doing very well, at least it doesn't show the student campuses(May be that's not the best example of under-performing OSM): http://mc.bbbike.org/mc/?lon=27.5626&lat=47.18879&zoom=17&num=4&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-map&mt2=yahoo-map&mt3=bing-map
Amen to that.
People often find it hard to understand that "google using OSM data while keeping their added value" is not only desirable, but completely possible and ok with OSM.
And what about these?
Sarajevo:
http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&lon=18.38325&lat=43.83595&zoom=13
Gaza:
http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&lon=34.45762&lat=31.52649&zoom=14
Well I think there is a genuine community of Google Map Maker contributors (although perhaps I should be more skeptical. I've heard rumours they also pay rooms full of people in India to do moderation of contributions and perhaps a fair proportion of the basic mapping )
But you're right. OpenStreetMap is the *real* story of community created and community owned maps. There is one aspect of this which you haven't mentioned, but which starkly exposes Google Map Maker as the tool of corporate commercial tool of exploitation it really is. Access to the raw data. This page spells out the real difference between Google Map Maker and OpenStreetMap: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker
What a shame that all of the tech press have so gushingly ceased upon this google's Korea story without even *mentioning* this not-profit-project.
Usually I wouldn't be so picky, but it might detract from the awesomeness of what you're saying!!
Your third last paragraph says "had mistaken a corporate effort for a community one", but really, CNN saw a community effort, and mistakenly considered it to be a corporate one.
That said, great find, nice article, opened my eyes to OSM... thanks!
I admire Marble on my N9. It's a great tool for navigation, tracking and just looking at stuff. Sometimes it feels pretty slow though which is probably due to the N9's limited computational power.
Also I tend to plan the routes over on my PC with marble and then send it to the phone when I'm planning a longer trip.
I think someone should build a GPS device based on marble. I really do.
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