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by bcks 963 days ago
I lurk in an online community of journalist coders and some folks there are excited about PMTiles as cost-saving way to host your own custom-styled map tiles.

See, for instance, "How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions" https://www.kschaul.com/post/2023/02/16/how-the-post-is-repl...

2 comments

How do the publications know this data is accurate?
Most of these piggyback on the OSM for the data tier, which $T companies work on. Afaict the discussion is more about compute on top - tile generation, interactive renderers, ... .
$T companies aren't a source of truth. Much of journalism is reporting on their errors, including the intentional, reckless, and lazy kinds.
What would you suggest the publications use instead? Maps from billion dollar companies!
I asked the question because it's an interesting question. In our world flooded in misinformation and cheap data, there's often little accurate, high-quality data.
I'm not sure what answer you are looking for / what alternative you are suggesting?

OSM is the biggest community effort - NGO, volunteer, corporate, etc - to solve data quality in GIS. The participants do everything to improve quality from individuals walking around with GPS devices to companies launching low earth orbit satellites into space and self-driving cars in the ground with AI error detection.

There is a more corporate and afaict anti-google effort more recently by tomtom and google competitors (Microsoft, meta) called Overture, which seems to be attempting a more closed and big corporate governed fork & ecosystem replacement of OSM, even if they phrase it as complementary. Your questioning of OSM-as-misinformation seems interesting in the comparative context of alternatives like Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Overture.

Sounds like a neat community. Can you share where it is?
Sure thing, check out NICAR-L: https://www.ire.org/resources/listservs/