[OSM-talk] OSM in India

john whelan jwhelan0112 at gmail.com
Tue Jun 16 10:41:32 UTC 2015


Could we make an effort to map one bit of India remotely ideally one that
has a few mappers in it or users and see if it can grow from there?  Any
NGOs operating in India?

I think there are mappers in Bangladesh or East Bengal as it used to be
called before it split from India perhaps they might have some ideas?  Yes
I am aware that India is a very large place.

Cheerio John

On 15 June 2015 at 22:01, Arun Ganesh <arun.planemad at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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>
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20150616/555a81db/attachment.html>


More information about the talk mailing list