[OSM-talk] OSM in India

[Arun Ganesh]

> Fair enough. Although a quick mapcompare session shows that GM has
> nowhere near the quality that it has in Europe/America, so it should
> be less work for OSM to overtake GM in India than it took in Europe (I
> know, if the community is tiny, "less overall work" is still way more
> work for each individual).
>
Businesses throughout the country want to list themselves on GM to get more
customers. I have been to remote parts of the country where hoteliers or
shop owners ask me how they can be listed. This POI database is massive and
along with it comes address information which is data gold in India for
geocoding. There is low business incentive for anyone to list themselves on
OSM, moreover the computer skills to do that is lacking by most people. If
there were more users of openstreetmap, this can change quickly.


> You point out an interesting bit of information though: GM is for
> English speakers. Do you render a Hindi (and other languages)
> slippymap ? Provide Hindi OSMand and Garmin maps ? That might catch
> the attention of many users. In Ireland we have an all-Gaelic map
> (
> http://maps.openstreetmap.ie/?zoom=9&layers=00BFFFFFF&lat=52.92847&lon=-7.65252
> )
> that attracts people from outside OSM.
>

Its a given that most users of new technology in the country are familiar
with English, or atleast the Latin alphabet. One may not be able to speak
the language but can easily read street signs and it is more familiar than
localized signage. We have had trials with localized maps
http://yogiks.github.io/osm-kn/map/ but apart from being good PR they have
limited practical use in daily life.

We would need to support 22 languages and in offline mediums to make the
maps truly accessible to most of the people. Till then maps will continue
to be used only by a small class of the population..


-- 
 Arun Ganesh
(planemad) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Planemad>
 <http://j.mp/ArunGanesh>
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