Open US GPS Data? 327
tobiasly writes "I read an article today about a map error on the popular Garmin GPS devices which often leads to truckers in a particular town becoming trapped. From my own experience, every electronic map I've ever seen (Google, Mapquest, my Mio GPS) has the layout of my neighborhood completely and frustratingly wrong. A quick search turned up only one open-source mapping project, but it's for New Zealand only. Why are there no comparable projects in the U.S. or elsewhere? Obviously such a project would need a good peer-review/moderation/trust system but I'd gladly put in the time necessary to drive around town with my GPS in "tracking" mode, then upload, tag, and verify my local data. Has anyone with more technical knowledge in maps and auto-routing looked more into this? Are there technical limitations to such a project? Should the government subsidize a project to create open, free, up-to-date electronic maps? Surely there is a public benefit available from such a project."
TomTom MapShare (Score:2, Informative)
Re:TomTom MapShare (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with an "open source project". It is more like:
1. Make something that is so-so.
2. Profit!
3. Let the people who pay a lot of money for this so-so product do work for You without paying them for it. These users will take Your product from the so-so stadium and turn it into a good product.
4. Even more Profit! without any costs.
Reminds me a bit of cddb... What the OP wants is something like Freedb.
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Re:TomTom MapShare (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I like features like this [gizmodo.com] on TomTom, but yes, an open source database would rock. Even something that pulled from google maps would be cool, IMO, as long as google maps stays free.
Re:TomTom MapShare (Score:4, Interesting)
The same principle holds true for restaurants. The first couple of bucks will go into food quality and better service. There is a very real difference between a $5 hamburger meal and a $15 steak. But the next $50 will go into square plates, french accents and, of course, exclusivity in the form of missed opportunity costs. You pay for the fact that they might have sold the food to the person currently waiting at the bar.
In this light you'll probably understand how downright stupid it is to share that little known Thai restaurant behind the strip mall with the rest of the planet. Before you know it, hordes of TomTom-toting patrons will crowd your once lovely restaurant. Prices will skyrocket, portions will shrink and before you know it it will obtain a Michelin star and you will have to find somewhere else to eat.
The manufacturers don't make the maps (Score:3, Informative)
You can buy them too. Very expensive, and most of the US maps are completely shite anyway. If you were to create a good database of routes, streets etc, the PND and phone manufacturers would love you.
The only really updatable maps I've come across are Google maps, and of course Nokia have Ovi on the way, where the whole point is to be able to sync routes/locations with your friends.
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The data is actually easy to parse. far easier than navteq data.
Note that Mapmakers make intentional mistakes... (Score:3, Interesting)
Folks, be aware that one way that a mapmaker "improves" on a copyright protection is to intentionally alter a small section of a map (and in a book, a few at random) that is hopefully not used. This helps them to prosecute somebody that steals the map information and resells it. Granted, this is known for hard-copy maps, but I believe it is also true for GPS maps as well (call them the "soft-copy" versions).
I can attest to this because near where my parents live on most maps there is a road that appear
Sometimes they're easy to spot... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sometimes they're easy to spot... (Score:4, Informative)
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Dummy1456&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=32.80241,75.146484&ie=UTF8&ll=52.784492,-1.615934&spn=0.012225,0.036693&z=15 [google.com]
Re:Note that Mapmakers make intentional mistakes.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Having mapped a couple of square miles for OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org], I can attest to the fact that these alterations are incredibly common on Google Maps. There are half a dozen within half a mile of my house, most being added curves or extensions to dead-end roads and added or removed traffic islands. Google also cunningly add fake roads to the map data which correlate with features which look like roads on the satellite imagery but actually aren't - they're private drives, streams, paths rather than roads through woodland etc. The ones near me wouldn't seriously affect navigation, but some I've seen in the past would. Oh yes, Google Maps is also shifted by about 5m from WGS84 (GPS coordinates) round here, I presume this is intentional too.
open street map? (Score:5, Informative)
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No? There are commercial applications... (Score:5, Informative)
I am amongst the ones who believe we're only seeing the beginning of OSM everywhere. Contrary to your comment, I believe it is happening and will not take that long to reach some level of overall maturity. As to why is doesn't need an army of volunteers? Because, as done with the TIGER dataset, datasets are directly piped into OSM, as done in the Netherlands last year [slashgeo.org].
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?! It's come a LOONG WAY! (Score:2)
One of the best things about the project is the user control of the data. Upload a GPS tracklog of the area you deem deficient.
They recently gained access to a main source of GPS data (can't remember exactly who/where - maybe it's in the KDE4/Marble video? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6642148224800885420&hl=en-GB [google.com] @ 1:11:00)
This thing is poised to take off.
Re:open street map? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:open street map? (Score:5, Interesting)
Often the errors you see is because there was a planned development that never went through it they (the city/county whoever) changed the traffic flow more recently then the map data is. I found this to be the case back in 1991 when I was delivering pizzas. I grabbed a city map from a tourist booth only to find some roads didn't exist. I purchased a random McNally or whatever the name is from a gas station to find the same errors. After I went to the city engineers office looking for an accurate map, they explained this to me. It was also interesting that I would watch development projects going up and already have a map complete with street names several years after this.
If you see a map problem with any map, I would bet it is something to do with the political entity more then the map maker. It might be them in some cases but roads dead ending when they should go through a town is the cities fault. And you will likely find the same error across multiple maps.
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http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/index.html [census.gov]
2006 is last year though of the old data format. 2008 release will be a completely new format with better polygon definition rules.
Re:open street map? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:open street map? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:open street map? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:open street map? (Score:5, Funny)
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Do they allow you to enter: speed limit, turn restrictions, divided highway (important when figuring out left turns on a major road), address range, class of road (primary, secondary,
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That doesn't even make sense. GIS [wikipedia.org] doesn't define any data structures (excepting in the general sense that spatial data is involved somewhere). There are some standard and common structure
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They're called tags (Score:3, Informative)
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Map_Features [openstreetmap.org]
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There's so much more potential to OpenStreetMap than just what's on the front page of the website.
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On that basis, having looked for under a min and seen several huge glaring errors I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable using this map for any navigation.
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Re:open street map? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I love the idea of openstreetmap but in practice I don't think it will work for any serious applications. First of I could correct the mistakes I can see next to my house but I don't have a GPS so I'm unable to do that, many other people will be in a similar situation and there will be many more people who have a GPS who wont ever hear about this project or co
Currently slashdotted - but it was never very fast (Score:2)
Roadnav is an open source street nav solution (Score:2)
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Upload your trace, click "edit" next to it, and it'll open in Potlatch (the Flash-based editor - disclaimer, I wrote it
Frustrating (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Frustrating (Score:5, Informative)
I think you are underestimating just how many roads there are in the US.
Source: National Highway System (United States) [wikipedia.org]
The National Highway System (NHS) of the United States comprises approximately 160,000 miles (256,000 kilometers) of roadway, including the Interstate Highway System as well as other roads, which are important to the nation's economy, defense, and mobility.
Further down in the same article:
The 160,000 miles of NHS include only 4% of the nation's roads, but they carry more than 40% of all highway traffic, 75% of heavy truck traffic, and 90% of tourist traffic.
That's a lot of roads. Stupid lazy companies...
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Re:Frustrating (Score:4, Interesting)
The USA has a total of about four million miles of road. How would you go about mapping it all, and at what cost? Take a car, a driver and a passenger, the passenger having a notebook with GPS. And the notebook needs some pretty clever software. As the driver drives along, the passenger keeps track of everything that is going on - his job is to type in the name of the road, suitability for what kind of traffic, obstacles, and where you can turn. You'd probably want a separate input device for special functions, like road to the left, road to the right, or for "missed something" (the driver probably can't just stop anytime). So the software keeps building up a database, keeps track of things that are missing (if you typed in "there is a left turn here" then you'll have to follow that turn at some time).
With all overhead, you should be able to build a road map at about 10 miles per hour (less in New York, but more on country roads that stretch for miles). That is 400,000 hours. Lets say you can do 2000 hours a year, that is 200 cars driving around for a year. 400 people doing the work. If the job pays $60,000 a year, that is $24,000,000 in wages. You'd drive a total of say 12 million miles; at 100,000 miles per car that is 120 cars destroyed. Say $20,000 per car, that is $6 mil. $30 million, double it for everything I forgot, that is about $60 million to get complete road maps of the USA from scratch.
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Here a few examples I could show you in a fifteen minute drive:
seasonal roads
privately maintained farm roads, service roads, gated communities, government reservations and the like. which share nothing in common but distrust of strangers.
long-obscured, missing or unreadable road signs
names too long for the standard-length sign. abbreviations that are more misleading than helpful
names the locals never use themselves
--- the outer ring of development known since 1934 as
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Same here. The problem is that the bad mapping is on the real official map straight from the city courthouse -- I looked last time I was in there. The only way Google/MapQuest/etc. would even know about it would be to drive the streets and make their own unofficial correction.
So do something about it... (Score:5, Interesting)
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To the submitter: (Score:5, Funny)
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That is one possibility. The other is to move to the middle of nowhere, where there aren't any roads - at least that way you can't complain your road is a meter off.
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for Argentina... (Score:3, Informative)
That's a pretty big job (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's a pretty big job (Score:5, Informative)
Keep in mind that there's USGS [usgs.gov], and that's not the only source of public maps (though that particular source isn't really focused on making navigation easier).
Most states are now working on providing a unified system for people to put their map info into (currently the best source of maps is counties and property appraisers - both of which can easily be mandated to upload their data if it doesn't cost them much).
So give it time. In the US this will become something provided as a government service, and the only people selling things will be the ones writing software that analyzes the data.
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This simply cannot be repeated enough. There are millions of miles of roads in this country - of all different types.
It's not as simple as driving around with your GPSr is 'track' mode, as mapmakers also have to deal with converting between datums, etc...
Not to mention that your average GPSr is not all that accurate. At our local Geocaching gatherings we regularly have 'coordinate hunts', where a surveyor grade GPSr is used to locate
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It looks like Massachusetts gives this data away for free [state.ma.us]. I found that page as a reference from a Wikipedia article about some state route in Massachusetts. The data looks to be very detailed, the dataset is around 100MB. Heck, just read the Road Inventory Data Dictionary [state.ma.us] to get an idea of what they record. And yes, I know it's in an Access database, but it wouldn't be that hard to translate into whatever format one would
Government involvement (Score:2)
Re:Government involvement (Score:4, Insightful)
I would point out that Government funding is the reason that you are able to A) connect to thousands of computers/websites across the globe right now, and B) the reason that you even have a "computer" sitting on your desk. Ironically, this funding is also the reason that satillites in space can provide us with overhead images that you see in Google Maps and the like as well.
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Odd routing (Score:4, Interesting)
There are several interesting implications, the most obvious being "sponsored routing" down a particular street in a business dist.....gotta go, I'm on the phone with my patent attorney.
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The next left will add 0.3 of a mile and an extra turn to my journey bu
Government Maps - of course (Score:5, Insightful)
~whm
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Re:Government Maps - of course (Score:5, Informative)
Now, as for the fantasy of people driving around with a gps attached to their car (ha ha, isn't that stupid!), um, oh:
http://www.navteq.com/about/whatis_difference.html [navteq.com]
"NAVTEQ digital map data is built on the roads of the world. Over seven hundred NAVTEQ field researchers from approximately 168 offices drive millions of kilometers of the road network each year. To provide uniformity and maximize precision each team works to a single global specification. And each team has state-of-the-art equipment, including our proprietary GPS-based collection technology and GWS software.
These field teams are constantly verifying and updating the database, not only in terms of road geometry, but also in details. Each team finds and records up to 260 attributes--everything from addresses and road signs to turn restrictions--for each segment of road. The result is the NAVTEQ difference: digital map data that is precise, robust and multifaceted."
There's no pretense; Navteq has people driving around, with gps's, verifying speed limits, road conditions, etc. That's why companies like Google and Yahoo buy their data. Before you act like an ass, you might want to do some rudimentary fact-checking...
TigerData et al (Score:4, Informative)
2. As for "driving around" it would depend upon how accurate the device is. The local utility company I work closely with spent 5,000$ just on the handheld to receive subcentimeter readings and about 20,000$ on the base station to accompany it. Your typical yellow DeLorme unit is great for driving around but it is not a data collection unit I would use when building maps. Depending upon satellite coverage for your area (weather, tree cover, geography, the placement of the 3 satellites needed to position accurately) your store bought unit could be as much as 100ft or more off your actual location and rarely closer than 5ft. Again depending upon coverage and the device. Then add the need for regular updates and mapping changes.
3. An open source mapping project would be great, but it is currently rather expensive to actually collect and process the data needed to build accurate maps. A terrific source of addressing and centerline information is your local E911 Board. At least in my part of the world they do much of the fire district, centerline, and, of course, addressing for mapping.
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WHY?
Being an ass is soooo much easier, and you can often garner headlines better this way.
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Tracks4Australia (Score:3, Informative)
Maemo Mapper! (Score:3, Informative)
OpenStreetMap.org (Score:2)
(I see about 5-10 drivers a day drive up our street only to find it's a dead end even though this is clearly shown on the road signs; I guess they trust their SatNavs more than the road signs)
Tiger database (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/ [census.gov]
Format is a bit obscure, but it works rather ok. We were able to use the data to draw road maps and then find paths on them. I'm sure it has it's own problems too but maybe you could contact them and point out the errors.
Make a U-Turn (Score:3, Funny)
The story goes like this: My girlfriend got one for Christmas and we where going to test it by going to get grandmothers house. Halfway there my girlfriend went on autopilot, so to speak, because she's done this trip so many times. All the sudden we hear "Make a U-Turn... Recalculating" What the hell? Then we hear it again... The Garmin was telling us to perform illegal U-turns to work on its gps calculations.
I wonder if that would hold up "But officer. The GPS told me to!"
Re:Make a U-Turn (Score:5, Funny)
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Story (Score:3, Interesting)
Already exists (Score:2)
Mapshare? (Score:4, Informative)
I would love to see an open mapping project though.
Check your local streets dept. (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, it would be nice if there was some federal D.O.T. streets db for the entire country that your local streets department could upload all their changes into and all the GPS map folks would just that. I doubt it'll ever be that clean cut or that your local street department will want to even give any other city much less state or federal government department access to updated street info. This is just my personal experience working in a city police department and occasionally trying to get this information from the city entities that physically make and should be tracking these things.
The more that I see that its difficult or impossible for intercity departments to communicate I tend to think that the only real solution is for Pizza companies or UPS/FedEx to partner with Google streets to actually physically map out where their fleets move through.
If your city has a GIS department, then that should be keeping track of this information.... You could always do a FOIA request for any arcview street centerline data.
The problem is that most of us have problems getting that "updated" arcview street centerline data into our lowest price GPS device.
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There already is [wikipedia.org]. The problem is that mapmaking is much, much more difficult than many here at Slashdot seem to think.
(Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I have made maps. Both as part of a professional work and at an amateur level. I've been a cartography geek for around thirty years.)
Open Source UK GPS Data (Score:5, Informative)
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Huge database problem (Score:2)
Fixing errors on mapping sites (Score:3, Informative)
Please forgive the slightly off-topic post...
Two of the biggest map data providers are Navteq [navteq.com] and TeleAtlas [teleatlas.com]. Each company has a section on their website where you can report errors in their maps.
Since they will need to review your submission and mapping sites like Google Maps and Mapquest only update their map data a couple times a year, it will be a while before your correction goes public (if ever).
This is kind of obvious... (Score:2)
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I remember this one map... (Score:2)
The obvious solution... (Score:3, Insightful)
I know the feeling... (Score:2)
Prior art (Score:4, Informative)
This is a great idea. We could have some federal government institution which deals with lots of maps anyway take the initiative and create digitized map data for the whole country, using information from USGS quads. For "fact checking", they could mail out the map data to every municipality in the country, who would make corrections which would be incorporated into the system. The data would be publicly available from the government for free, to be used by open-source or commercial makers of maps and map tools.
Congrats! You've just re-invented TIGER, run by the U.S. Census Bureau. If you use map software, it probably uses TIGER data. If the data in your town is inaccurate, it's because your local government sucks.
The dancing dog observation (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a reality check. Pick any one-square-mile area of your community and attempt to create (and keep up to date) a GPS navigation system that will legally, safely, and efficiently navigate you between any two addresses within that square mile, keeping in mind your civil liabilities should your system cause accidents, injuries, or illegal driving maneuvers. Oh, and your navigation system has to fit in a device that's about the same size as a Palm Pilot or an iPod touch and that runs on rechargeable batteries.
Now scale this up by about 3.5 million to cover the United States.
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Do you consider the software or the database to be unfeasible? You talk about scaling things up, but there's very few reasons why software that works in one neighbourhood would fail in another except for deficiencies in the data.
The idea behind projects such as OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org] is to build the data, using contributors who are local to the area that they are mapping. I think OpenStreetMap is only beginning to pick up pace, and it is already getting quite good considering that it has been quite a lo
Surveying (CAD and GIS) (Score:3, Informative)
Bwahahaha! (Score:3, Insightful)
Mayor Dennis Elwell says residents on Fifth Street started complaining about trucks clogging their street about a year ago as GPS devices increased in popularity. Some drivers have to call police to open the gate because their trucks are too big to turn around.
Of course the map is wrong... (Score:3, Informative)
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In 2002 the Census Bureau contracted Harris to update the centerlines and attributes nationwide. Approximately 1200 of 3200 counties in the US have been completed with another 300 or so due in March. Details on the "MAF/TIGER Accuracy Improvement Pr
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Combine that with Open Source GIS software [opensourcegis.org] to query the data source and you're in business.
For this to work, you have to have a huge pool of people willing to drive a lot. Even the big map players (NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas) have problems keeping data up to speed, a
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Re:Depends on the GPS you buy (Score:4, Funny)