[nmglug] The benefits of open mapping

[Anthony J. Bentley]

Hi all,

Here's a subject near to my heart: open source maps (and other big data
projects).

There are several projects that combined can provide a nice alternative
to Google Maps, depending on your area.

Advantages include:

- Licensing: You are free to copy the data for any purpose. Google Maps
lets you download maps, but they're limited in size and what you can do
with them. In contrast, with free maps I have the entirety of New Mexico,
Texas, Arizona, and Colorado on my phone and they're completely routable
without internet access. (This has saved me on a roadtrip or two after
getting lost in areas without cell coverage!)

- Crowdsourcing: Google doesn't put much effort into low-population
areas, like my hometown of Datil, NM. And even in Albuquerque their
road coverage isn't perfect (especially when it comes to one-way roads
and such). Being able to fix bugs like that instantly is really great.

- Privacy: We all know that Google makes its money from ads and user
tracking. Some people are willing to put up with that for the resulting
product, but others are open to privacy-respecting alternatives. 


Open source mapping is a great way for both non-technical and technical
people to contribute to the community. Anybody can edit a map, and
everybody can see the benefit of better ones.

So, how can we help?

- Edit OpenStreetMap! https://www.openstreetmap.org/

You can add roads or buildings, parking lots, fix one-way streets,
or add bicycle infrastructure like trails and bike racks (that show up
on http://opencyclemap.org/), or bathrooms in national parks, or...

It's a lot like Wikipedia. Changes you make show up within a few minutes
on the main site.

- Work with local governments/entities to provide freely licensed data!

Obviously I'm never going to add addresses for the hundreds of thousands
of houses and businesses in the Albuquerque metro area all by myself.
That's why there are projects that work with goverments to export data
in a freely licensed, open source friendly format. Some examples:

OpenAddresses (https://openaddresses.io/), for street addresses

TransitLand (https://transit.land/), for public transportation

National Map Corps (http://nationalmap.gov/TheNationalMapCorps/),
a user-editable USGS landmarks database

You can help by submitting address datasets, GTFS feeds, etc to the
above projects, or convincing governments, universities, and other
public entities to do the same. Albuquerque is a clear leader in this
regard; they provide address data and public transit feeds along with a
ton of other public domain data at their website:
https://www.cabq.gov/abq-data

Other good examples are UNM (https://opendata.unm.edu/) and Farmington.
I'm not aware of any such initiative for Santa Fe... anybody up there
willing/able to try making contacts in the government?

The federal Department of Transportation has been asking localities
to provide open transit feeds, which may help move things along.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160404135841/http://gis.rita.dot.gov/Transit/downloads/DearColleague.pdf

- Use and improve free software!

There's a lot of neat stuff you can do with all these projects. Some
of the software I use frequently for maps:

Maps.me: offline Android maps
OSMAnd: offline Android maps (free on F-droid)
KDE Marble: desktop map viewer
Mapillary: crowdsource photos (Street View alternative)
JOSM: desktop openstreetmap editor
Mapbox: create hosted maps to embed in your website
Mapzen: provides routing software, etc to host on your own server

-- 
Anthony J. Bentley