Re:Google Maps Platform
by jasonHav on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @05:09PM
(#16981183)
As someone who's only every used Google Maps, can anyone suggest a solid alternative? Geocoding and directions would be the minimum I'd need - with solid data in Australia.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Mapbox offers maps, geocoding, and directions, with solid coverage in Australia.
https://www.mapbox.com/geocoding/
Happy to answer any questions.
Disclaimer: I work at Mapbox.
How long does it take for an edit to propagate from OSM to Mapbox's tiles? Average/worst case. I know this is a tough problem, so I don't envy you. :-)
Mapbox no longer guarantees a time (https://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/913812009547902978) Worst I've read about is 3 months. That surprising because openstreetmap.org's tile servers aim for sub-10 minute updates and often I see my changes even faster. https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=61040
Well, they probably have some kind of tile "lint", need to precompute a bunch of routing data (depending on what their actual algorithm is), sync all their rendering/prerendering pipelines at a common revision, propagate outputs to cache servers, etc. So it can't easily be done at every change, unless they have a design where small incremental deltas are explicitly supported by all their services. It is a time- and resource-intensive process. Still, three months sounds like a lot.
Re:Google Maps Platform
by maxerickson on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @08:13PM
(#16982269)
The concern seems to be moderation (but they haven't made a clear statement about it either). The current pace of updates is slower than what they were doing a year ago, so it probably isn't a technical thing.
Their routing engine updates more frequently than the rendering data.
OSM sub-10 minute updates really depends on zoom level and data. With low zooms the update can take weeks even there, as I recently learned in a hard way. It is more important to have consistent and laundered map data than someone's last minute changes.
If you need this sort of update frequency, you can host it yourself and rerender whenever you want.
Does mapbox provide place details data yet? Last time I spoke w/ sales it was a planned feature, but not released.
What kind of places details are you looking for?
Depending on the geographic region, Mapbox has data for regions, cities, addresses, zipcodes, and points-of-interest (POI).
This is the coverage per region: https://www.mapbox.com/geocoding/#coverage
For professional maps, routing, places and traffic, you can try TomTom Maps (ndlr I work there). developer.tomtom.com
Free evaluations and the pricing is pretty straightforward, no subscriptions, no limits, no ads.