TomTom on Openmoko?

[Ortwin Regel]

On 3/27/08, David Pottage <david at electric-spoon.com> wrote:
>
> 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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>

I disagree. At the moment, very few people have GPS equipped devices.
This will change rapidly in the future as GPS chips become the next
thing being put into every mobile phone. I am sure that Open Streetmap
will start to grow as fast as Wikipedia, then, and soon be unbeatable
in being up-to-date and complete. Just look at how fascinated people
were and are with Google Earth! If it's pretty easy for them to
contribute, many will.

At this point I don't worry about how complete OSM is. I worry about
how I can contribute to make it more complete! Sounds like it's
already possible to gather data for it with the Neo. I'll start asap.

Ortwin