[OSM-talk] Using OpenStreetMap on a daily basis

[Simon Poole]

Am 12.07.2013 21:48, schrieb Paweł Paprota:
>> The important part is to understand that the current lack of end-user
>> services is not because of lack of knowledge, technology or any thing
>> similar, but by design.
> Umm, no, not really. It most certainly *is* because of the lack of
> knowledge, technology, time, people and many other resources. It is not
> easy to provide any non-trivial end-user services based on OSM data -
> mainly because there is *a lot* of data. Take any example, like
> clickable POIs, better history, routing, search. If anyone wants to take
> such services to Google Maps level (so search "just works" for a change)
> then it WILL be hard to implement.

Nobody was claiming that doing any of the above is "easy", but it is
simply a question of organizing the necessary resources (mainly money).
That however would likely have a number of consequences that have been
considered undesirable, at least up to now. What we have proven is that
we can gather detailed map data at a global scale and operate the
necessary infrastructure with a very high level of reliability and
availability  with very little administrative overhead, on a shoe string
budget and with community driven processes and for the major part by
volunteers. Nobody else has done anything remotely similar.

Does the community really want to transform that to something closer to
the top heavy Wikipedia model which would be a likely consequence of
running a full consumer mapping site?

>
> Don't spread misinformation that anything is "by design". If there were
> people to tackle those hard tasks then would anyone say "no" because
> "that's our design"? I don't think so.

I could point you to any number of EWG/OWG, board minutes etc that
clearly support the statement, but I think reading this thread alone
should be enough. Luckily the people working on stuff destined for the
main site have had the sense to work on mapper centric stuff (which
includes yourself), even Rolands clickable POI implementation is not
geared towards your average pure consumer (undoubtedly it could be made
to work in such a fashion though).

Simon