[OSM-talk] Yah** imagery
John Fagan
John at multimap.com
Tue Feb 6 16:48:46 GMT 2007
Good comments Richard. The OSM community have a great opportunity to
create some high quality maps without the commercial and technical
limitations that other "services" may have. OSM has full control, so I
look forward to seeing what comes out of the cartographic review!
John.
-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org
[mailto:talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of Richard Fairhurst
Sent: 06 February 2007 15:56
To: talk at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Yah** imagery
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
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