[OSM-talk] some notes, ostensibly from MapQuest (sorry if this is spam)

[Antony Pegg]

Hi all,

bear with me, not used to be an official spokesperson type for anything.

fortunately I dont think our corporate communications have discovered the
OSM lists yet.

Anyway:

Update!

Today MapQuest rolled out three more international OSM sites
(oooh aaaah woooh!)

open.mapquest.in for India - rather big deal for mapQuest actually.  First
site out of EU & NA we've done in...a looong time. All thanks to the power
of OSM.  Comments from co-workers in our Banglaor office were very
enthusiastic. Hoping it as cool a thing as it seems to have country/language
specific portals.

In that vein, Belgium and Austria (.be and .at) rolled out today too, in
Europe.

Mostly un-noticed by the popular press(sic) - we restored the Locator /
Search in map toolbar from the main commercial website, that sits above the
map.  Basically it gives handy icons to just turn on "categories" of POIs
(points of interest) on to the map.

This was more "fun" that you might imagine.  The commercial logic is all
based around SIC codes and we had to map that over to align with OSM tags.

The extra search box next to the toolbar (Search in Map) is awesomely
special unless you know Nominatim, in which case you'll point out that Twain
already basically had it..we just had to wire it up.

However - completely unmentioned anywhere except this email so far, was the
"Search Nearby" stuff - something else we wired back up from the main
MapQuest site.

If you get a search result, you'll notice a "search nearby" link by your
result - so you can find one thing (eg: the Jeremy Bentham) and then search
for something else around it (eg: cinemas).

We're still working thru wiring up some of the categories..but one of our
use cases was that if you have a saved route (into My Maps...you ARE using
the My Maps feature, right?) you can search along the entire route.  At the
11th hour we found out Nominatim didnt have Corridor Search (thats searching
along a route highlight, instead of just inside a bounding box).  Twain
added this feature to Nominatim in about 2 days.  two days!! thats pretty
hardcore in my book!  I just wanted to rave about that.

Beyond that we've got some more stuff coming out on Thursday (no, not more
sites - developery type stuff we hope will be helpful and useful)

aaaand finally...

I just wanted to say...

someone (I think it was Anthony) recently said that we had to open up our
tiles because of the CC-by-SA licence.

On reflection, yeah I guess technically you are correct, we had to... but we
never even asked the question - we wanted to.  We are happy to. And I dont
care if OSM is a CC-SA, ODBL, WTF, LGPL, or Cat licence - I'm still going to
want you to have access to, and use the MQ tiles, if at all possible.

So on reflection, please dont intimate that the only reason we're providing
tiles (or anything in fact) is because we HAD to. its not accurate. we never
even considered whether we were compelled to, until it was brought up here.

Cheers, sorry if this is considered spam, feedback always welcome, Go
Gooners.

Ant
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