Crowdsourced Maps Project - mods help/thoughts

**Heather** · 10-05-2009, 11:20 AM

We just have to get started - if we can get 2K forum members uploading tracks..then we can get others excited about helping us solve this problem. I am going to start reaching out to universities as well, to get their input.

lambospirit, we had an interesting request:

Originally Posted by soundman98

If you have the time, I think it would be a great idea to add a sticky with a link to the most current version of the logging program(and a quick feature list) and a setup How-To, so setup illiterate people like me can confidently install the program.

Would you mind helping start this? Can i suggest that we make it a wiki article so that others can contribute and we can change it as needed over time?

**justchat_1** · 10-05-2009, 11:45 AM

Can we get some agreement on:
a) How will the data be used?

Waypoints only for use in open street maps?
Waypoints and roadnames for those that enter them?
Historic traffic data, traffic light info, etc?
Other?

Just collecting data to get the project moving forward wont do any good if the data isn't useful.
b) What data is transmitted to the server? Specifically are x points scrubbed from the beginning? Is that user selectable? Are sequence numbers or time stamps included (kind of depends on a)? Are multiple points collected when stopped? (again depends on a)
c) Under what conditions is a point considered valid (4d lock? <=5meter deviation? Speed not over 100mph? etc.)
d) How will the data be stored on the server end? Any processing/formatting required?

D is huge - for your "2K users" estimate even assuming each user drives an hour a day total, using the current storage method thats 2.5GB per day.

**JohnWPB** · 10-05-2009, 01:49 PM

I. Think that is. The main problem. Sure I can collect way points and such, but what is this dada with no street names?

-Posted from my iPhone

**justchat_1** · 10-05-2009, 02:03 PM

Originally Posted by JohnWPB

I. Think that is. The main problem. Sure I can collect way points and such, but what is this dada with no street names?

-Posted from my iPhone

Well go look at the data at open street maps - a lot of that was collected without being tagged. I've worked on projects that were far harder then this - this really isn't too hard to pull off its just a matter of having a decent user base (which personally I don't think is there).

I think the point would be to provide waypoint data to openstreet maps so then its users can compare the data with known roads. Ideally being able to collect all theses points and then run a comparison with open streetmaps would be ideal. Something like if named road exists at point x, drop point x otherwise add to "to be tagged" queue. This could allow an automated way to find and fill gaps in OSM's data.

Same concept if you just want to acquire traffic info. Get all the points into a database, use OSM to turn points into street names, a little data crunching and you can do traffic statistics per section of road.

**Tical84** · 10-05-2009, 02:26 PM

I'll play along as soon as my truckputer gets installed. I don't think it would be too much work to once a day or week even to name some streets. Use Google maps for address and zip/postal code info. We can grow the user base to include non members.

**justchat_1** · 10-05-2009, 02:36 PM

Originally Posted by Tical84

I'll play along as soon as my truckputer gets installed. I don't think it would be too much work to once a day or week even to name some streets. Use Google maps for address and zip/postal code info. We can grow the user base to include non members.

Except that would be illegal...if you use Google to lookup street names technically your stealing their copyright data. They will even put in deliberate misspellings, apostrophes and even fake roads just to catch someone stealing from their service (actually navteq and tele atlas both do) and it would be one huge lawsuit to say the least. Thats why you'll notice big warnings all over Open Street Maps that say what sources you can use, and that you cannot even look at google maps or the other big names when you are tagging.

**Tical84** · 10-05-2009, 02:44 PM

Ah, I did not know that.
Well street names should still be easy to do, zips and addresses would be more time consuming then.

**Bugbyte** · 10-05-2009, 03:24 PM

OpenStreetMap has a lot of the names of streets and routes. It is freely available, so you may be able to 'jumpstart' this project by using much of the data that they have or by looking it up if they have an api.

**Heather** · 10-05-2009, 03:32 PM

Also- we can start making the tracks publicly available via ftp, so people can access them. For the moment though, I think there is only one person uploading. Has anyone else started uploading?

**justchat_1** · 10-05-2009, 03:32 PM

Which still gets back to the original point of WHAT IS THIS PROJECT FOR?! I've seen lots of pushing to get things moving but absolutely nothing about what direction that is. Collecting points because they could be used for "something" makes no sense - figure out the purpose and then we can figure out what data to collect and how to use it.