Also, OSM allowed the amazing initiative of http://hotosm.org/ to be built -- a website where contributors from around the world help humanitarian organizations by adding data into OSM for various areas where people are in grave need (e.g. finding houses of people in drought areas in Africa) based on satellite & aerial imagery. I tried this, and really couldn't walk away much too far into the night, can get addicting... also I think it's something similar to analyzing photos from spy satellites during WWII, only for 100% good case! For more details, see:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team

Quoting from the wiki page:

"From the beginning of OpenStreetMap it was anticipated that open, free map data would be a tremendous benefit for humanitarian aid and economic development. The idea was proved during the Haiti earthquake in 2010. HOT was incorporated in the immediate aftermath, August 2010, as a U.S. nonprofit and became a registered 501(c)3 charitable organization in 2013. Anyone is welcome to contribute to the HOT mission via our Tasking Manager - all you need is an OpenStreetMap Username. We ask only that you try to uphold the same code of conduct as our members, see our HOT Membership Code."

Surprisingly for me, quite many important buildings can be discovered without local knowledge (i.e. without "being there physically"), purely based on aerial imagery and a specially crafted guide. See e.g. the following link, with some hints and clues on how to recognize a school for a current (urgent!) pre-typhoon task http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/804:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team/Typ...

If anyone wants to contribute, the online tool is really accessible and drive-by contributions (e.g. sub 10 minute) are totally fine: http://tasks.hotosm.org/

HOT arose spontanously from the Haitian earthquake. OSMers wanted to do something about the earthquake, so started mapping. Then people realised that something very useful had been created, so it was formalised into HOT.

I can second that. https://www.mapbox.com is a particularly notable technology on top of OSM. Initially I wanted to use Google maps with some customs styles but found their styling options pretty limited. Even worse it's too unreliable in China and there's no way around it. I used mapbox to easily create a nice map that incorporated our branding and then http://leafletjs.com/ to add interactivity on top of it. Very happy with it.

The zoom is much much faster than Google maps. Very nice.

I'm curious if you would know how to do this. I'm in the states and I would like to improve my local maps. I'm a complete newb to mapping and OSM. What I'd like to know is, what's the best way to link addresses and coordinates? Are there public databases? There are new office building and subdivisions that are not yet in OSM and I'd like to help do that. I just don't have time to enter all of them manually, so if there's a way to automate that...

The best way for a "complete newb" to improve OpenStreetMap is to just find the place that you are interested in and click on "Edit" and start drawing the missing features.

There are public datasets and imports that happen sometimes, but these are done by people who have experience in it, and usually in cooperation with the local government GIS that controls the dataset.

Going outside and recording what you see is still the gold standard for collecting data. Don't feel like you have to fix everything in your city - if you can write down a little bit every time you go out and then come back home and enter it in using the map editor, that's very valuable.

I did this the other day. A stream nearby has been given a new meandering path. I went out with a phone and some GPS tracking software, traced it and then mapped it.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=59.4867&mlon=17.8986#map=...

I have some friends who do this as a hobby. They meet the strangest people. Very entertaining.

What you're talking about is "imports". OSMers are wary of them. It's possible for someone to mess up existing data, to add bad data, damage the local community etc. Most of the map in the USA was imported in late 2007 ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER ). The map looks done, but the data quality is pretty poor.

Read more: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import

People are happy if you manually enter them.

Hi, you should also look into checking to see if there is a MapTime http://maptime.io/ near you. MapTimes have sprung up all over the world and are a great way to learn about mapping and OSM.

If you're specifically interested in adding data about addresses, you may want to look into http://openaddresses.io/

> Definitely a lot of room for both programmers and non-programmers to contribute.

As an engineer-developer hybrid, I found OSM mightily helpful when pulling midwest town data and running tornado strike simulations. I encourage contributors to look beyond the roads -- other infrastructure such as power lines or towers are rare to find in the data but can be extremely useful.

Do you know if OSM is any good at geocoding for US addresses? We're currently using Google, but we're often bumping into the 2,500/day ceiling, and the commercial license is $10k/year.

We have looked at some alternatives such as geocod.io, but quality seems a bit lacking and they don't offer some features we need (but which we would surely be able to develop ourselves if we could use OSM as a primary database).

OSM is just a data base. People have made geocoding that uses the OSM database. You can install it yourself (e.g. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim ) or use a hosted version ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Search_engines )

The advantage of OSM, is that if it's not returning the right data, you can fix it, and import it into your own hosted version.

It is not. Coverage is poor. At high zooms the main tiles at openstreetmap.org will show addresses, so you can go to a random place and see that there aren't any. Some areas are pretty complete (look at NYC), but there are many major cities with basically 0 addresses.

How accurate do you need? I have had great success in putting a proxy in place before your call out to Google to cache, remove addresses you don't think will geocode, and geocoding addresses you're happy with via free-sources first...

Have you tried the mapquest open data api? http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/open/geocoding-se...

Unfortunately it does not return the bounds of the matched feature. We use this to determine if results are accurate enough, by measuring the area of the bounds; for example, if the match is a long road (not a numbered street address), it makes no sense to use the latlng because it's quite obviously too imprecise; but if the road is quite short (less than 100m, say), it's acceptable to us. It's such an obvious feature to provide a geocoding API that I don't know why only Google does it.

Hey,

I'm one of the Geocod.io founders. I'm very interested in hearing about the features you're looking for and discuss data quality. Feel free to reach out here or at [email protected]

I've actually been in email contact with you before, back in March. Grep your mailbox for "Wild Bunch Sundance Crook".

I've had a great experience with Apple Maps, which are based in part on Open Street Map (giving data back too) and TomTom. I've found it's accurate enough to just trust it, and it's excellent at detecting and rerouting when I can't do what it wanted me to (eg: traffic in the way, or I just miss the turn.)

Apple has no official contributions to OSM. We are not even sure in which cases they use the data.

I didn't think Apple Maps gave any data back to OSM, do you have a link? I thought it was just one dump file from a few years ago that they used.

There's a suggestion that Apple is now using current OSM data (the latest Apple Maps copyright notice has ©2014, which it didn't before) but, that said, I've not seen any indication of it here in the UK.

"which are based in part on Open Street Map (giving data back too)"

I know for a fact this isn't true. What was your source for this?

Outside the US, Apple Maps suck ass (I'm sorry, but there's no other way to put it).

It depends on the city. In Melbourne, Australia for example I find Google Maps to be less accurate than Apple Maps. I also found the same in parts of Tokyo.

It's also great in Switzerland. And got improved in Serbia. Great for Austria, Italy and Germany. Europe is not that bad. For me way better than Google maps (especially for car navigation)

That is not true, Apple map is better than Google's in China, better than Baidu at navigation even. It uses a local map provider's (amap.com) data of course.

In my region (Atlantic Canada), OSM is much more detailed, up-to-date, and accurate than Apple maps.