[Wikimedia-l] The failure of Google, looking for open source alternatives

[Peter Gervai]

Hello,

Apart from the politics side and the end-of-the-world aspects there
are good points raised.

Right now there are some services based on the google map, mainly the
map itself, panoramio which puts images on map, routing engine
calculates directions, and several other layers exists on the map.

There is open content map: OSM. Image collections with geoinformation
exists, like Commons. Routing exists like YOURS, or graphhopper.
Geocoded wikipedia articles exist, and possibly several open geocoded
contents as well.

There is a point to bring these together and WMF have the resources
(both monetary and hardware-wise) to make it done. All the open-source
tools exist, WMF have the resources to host a tile server (or better
yet a vector tile server), we already host Commons, so it's well
possible to provide such a community-based resource.

Possibly the largest task would be to make an exceptionally good and
future-proof plan of all of these. Google made it wise, they are
pretty modular so they can insert new services easily. We can do that,
we are more numerous. ;-) With a good API it's possible to get
together something like goog earth where people can use provided
layers as well as insert new ones for themselves form the
layer-collections.

I personally would like to see geocoded commons images to appear on a
map to be able to use it instead of panoramio (even if I see the vast
problems with commons and the assurance of free and useful images;
it's hard to say how useful is an image of a field, hill or some
streets).

IMHO.

-- 
 byte-byte,
    grin