[OSM-talk] Yah** imagery

[Richard Fairhurst]

Quoting lewispusey <lewispusey at earthlink.net>:

> "With the yahoo
> photography, OSM could have maps that are vastly superior to those
> supplied by other web-based mapping services"
>      Not so. I'd invite you to check out those other "services" and   
> see how they do things. It might speed up your developement process   
> considerably.

?Que?

If I go to maps.google.co.uk (the market leader, apparently) and  
search for "Clun", then zoom in a bit, Safari tells me it's loading  
272 items. WTF? I only want 15 map tiles.

The A road through Clun is shown as a thick deep orange line. The B  
road is shown as a thick yellow line. Anyone used to typical UK  
mapping will mistakenly recognise these as a B road and an  
unclassified road respectively. On Google, amazingly, neither actually  
has the road number on.

There is nothing illustrating the character of the landscape, not even  
any hill shading derived from freely-available SRTM data: just a grey  
background with the odd cased white line. There are no icons to show  
where the pubs are, or the Youth Hostel, or to tell me a little about  
Clun and the surrounding countryside. Nearby villages are depicted by  
just a centred (centred! FFS) placename, with no grey shading to show  
the extent of building. No pubs. No rights of way. No long-distance  
paths. No National Cycle Network routes. No historic places. Nada.

Tell me again, what exactly is it we're meant to be learning?

I think you'll find most of us have used other webmaps pretty  
extensively. Some of us were even involved in developing them. Many of  
us are already aware of OSM's shortcomings and some of the things we  
have to do to overcome them - but, as per the original quote, can also  
see the potential for OSM to produce some of the best maps ever  
unleashed upon the web. Please don't patronise us.

Richard