OpenStreetMap is in trouble – a critical take on Bing Map Builder
I studied geography for about eight years in university and something that drove me kinda mad is how cartographic authoring tools were more like CAD software than they were like video games (I once had a short rant over dinner with the President of ESRI Canada about how my GPU is built for rendering geometries and ArcGIS ignores its existence).<p>On the surface, the CAD pedigree makes sense. But… why aren’t more tools like video games? Make it super easy for anyone to start getting involved.<p>I remember all the gatekeeping-like discussion in “Public Participation GIS” seminars: you’ve gotta be an expert to author good data because there’s so many ways to do it wrong. Blah. No.<p>One of my daydreams if I get FU money is to make an incredibly user friendly set of web based analytical GIS tools. Not just the basics like buffering and queries, but the entire spatial toolbox to build data processing pipelines. I want a layperson to be able to ask “where should I buy a house if I care about these four parameters?” (and for it to not be a hidden magic purpose built portal on some realtor website)<p>The immediate retort from my internal pessimist is “the data isn’t available or isn’t consistent“ but I don’t buy that anymore. I remember having to go ask nicely to obtain shapefiles from my city. Decades later it’s all just online. And the community can help catalog data sources, add metadata about transforming them to standard schemas, and sharing data pipelines with the community in some sort of catalog.<p>I really think it’s a UX problem above all else.