Comment by maelito
4 hours ago
We need global open congestion data. At least on the european scale.
It's important so that alternatives to Google Maps and Waze (Google) can emerge.
To create congestion data, one needs to own an OS with location tracking, or be an international mobile network. Won't happen.
[disclaimer : I work on an open source alternative to big tech's maps]
In my experience, the congestion data is not the issue: even with the split across Google / TomTom / Here / Apple / some hyperlocal alternatives, everyone seems to have reasonably good idea where the traffic jams are. Having up to date POIs is a different can of worms only solved by Google, not by some clever algo, but through the sheer brand recognition. They're the only ones that have this data fed to them by POI owners.
Well, Google has the most popular OS. Tomtom is not far from being the OS of lots of cars. Here, too. It's owned by Daimler/BMW/Audi (sold for 3 billions). Apple has the second most used mobile OS.
So yes, for these huge actors, it's quite easy to create congestion data.
The vast majority of POI churn information comes from streetview + machine learning object detection + automatic change detection + human verification. There are many clever algorithms in play through the entire pipeline. As moats go, its probably bigger than search.
You forgot the massive user base of Google. Users through comments are the first to tell Google that the POI changed. And shop owners are often the first users to worry.
How would you overcome the data source trust issue? In open data collection you either fingerprint the data to ensure validity or you anonymize the data to provide security, but striking the balance between the two seems like the biggest of hurdles in an effort like this.
The risk of the data being invalid seems as risky as the privacy implications in this case.
Good question. If one strong national actor (map app, for instance) could publish its live dataset, without even mixing with others, this could already be used.
Authorities could pay them for this service.
What is the OS alternative? OSM?
https://cartes.app. Based on OSM of course, but OSM is just a geographical database, with lots of incomplete UIs built on top by the community. Cartes is one of them, we're trying to make it complete and modern :)
That looks pretty cool - sorry to have a complaint immediately:
When opening the map on Firefox/Linux zooming to like a France-size view and then not doing anything, the view keeps scrolling up and down relatively slowly, but very annoyingly.
Zooming all the way out, it looks like the globe is jiggling back and forth ever so slightly, but continually.
I've recently seen this happen on another mapping application ( cannot remember which one) so it's probably in down the stack somewhere in a library you are using.
2 replies →