TomTom on Openmoko?

David Pottage david at electric-spoon.com
Thu Mar 27 18:05:14 CET 2008


On Thu, March 27, 2008 1:33 pm, Christ van Willegen wrote:

> Have you seen the progress that's been made in The Netherlands?
>
> i.e.:
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.375&lon=5.24898&zoom=17&layers=B0FT
> (yes, there are houses on there...)

It is very good. Presumably data from a Dutch publicly funded mapping
agency has been uploaded into the OSM databases.

By comparison if you zoom out an scroll south until you get to the border
with Belgium, the situation is very different. Major towns are just dots
on the map with perhaps the road thought the center but nothing else. The
situation for France appears to be even worse. The motorway network
appears to be complete, but much of the national trunk road network is
missing, let alone most towns and local roads. If you attempted to use an
OSM based satellite navigation system for a journey across France you
would not get very far.

What I am saying is that the OSM project looks promising and is a great
idea, but without major contributions from big publicly funded databases
it is only ever going to be a collection of small areas with good detail
separated by vast areas where just major roads are shown. Unlike a
software project like Linux the contributions from a few hundread talented
developers will never be enough. Unless a public body pays for it, The
only way for a particular town to get mapped is for an OSM enthusiast
_in_that_town_ to spend a lot of their time recording routes along every
street, and then editing it all together. I just don't think there will be
enough enthusiasts do do that outside major university towns.

-- 
David Pottage

Error compiling committee.c To many arguments to function.





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