Hi,
H.S.Rai wrote:
> Which are the good solid point which make OSM better than Google
> inspite of above observations.
I can currently think of two main advantages. For one, there is the
potential for the crowd sourced approach of OSM to provide more detailed
and accurate maps than the commercial providers such as TeleAtlas and
Navteq that google maps mostly uses. And in a few places like perhaps
e.g. Germany, some parts of the UK, Romania or Cypress and probably some
other places, OSM overall has already reached a higher coverage and
uptodateness than google maps. Unfortunately India probably doesn't
belong into this category quite yet.
But I think the real selling point of OSM is the free access to vector
data and its resulting flexibility. Although the benefit of free vector
data might not be immediately obvious to the joe public (potential
future mappers), the products and applications it enables hopefully are
and there is an constantly growing ecosystem thriving around the usage
of OSM data that give real benefits in comparison to google maps. The
ones I can currently think of roughly fit into three categories.
1) Mobile or Handheld navigation devices: Perhaps the most prominent
example hereof are the routable garmin maps, that allow you to put free
worldwide OSM maps on most garmin GPS devices, something you can't do
with google maps. Likewise, there are many apps for mobile phones that
allow you to use OpenStreetMap for maps and navigation. And although
Google Maps also has a mobile application, it always needs connectivity
to the internet and needs to download significant amount of data through
the mobile network, which can be problematic if network connectivity is
patchy, or data (roaming) charges are high. Apps based on OpenStreetMap
in contrast can use the data offline. E.g. OffMaps and Roadee for
iPhone, GpsMid or WE-travel for java based phones and many others such
as Navit for a variety of other platforms that aren't available to
google maps such as e.g. car-PCs or Sony PSPs.
2) Inovative new uses of geodata. One nice example that fits into this
category is perhaps MonopolyCityStreets. An massive online version of
monopoly played on a whole world map. This is actually a very curious
example, as it uses google map tiles to display the board, but uses
OpenStreetMap vector data for the entire backend game database and
without this, the game wouldn't have been possible. Other nice examples
are the use of OpenStreetMap data in rendering background scenery in
flight simulators or other games. Without OpenStreetMap these innovative
ideas wouldn't have been possible, as data from TeleAtlas or Navteq
would have been to expensive for these usages and Google maps only
provides rendered tiles, which aren't suitable for this.
3) Styling and customizing maps. Unlike Google maps that only provides a
single style, with OSM one can create as many different styles as one
wants. E.g. a special map style for India, or the cyle map, the public
transport map, the skiing piste map or just simply different colours
that e.g. go better with the website into which one wants to embed to
map. And with the style editors of CloudMade, there are actually some
nice simple tools to create new style, if one doesn't want to get into
the more flexible but more difficult process of writing own mapnik style
sheets.
So I think there are hopefully plenty of good examples of why
contributing to OSM is worth it and what it has to offer on top of
google maps. And imho flexibility and variety are the key selling points.
Kai
P.S. Sorry for breaking the mailinglist thread, but I am not subscribed
to talk-in. Nevertheless I felt like adding my 0.02$ into the discussion
of how best to convince people of the benefits of OpenStreetMap
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