OpenStreetMap
A critical analysis of Bing Map Builder part 2 - an update to 'OpenStreetMap is in Trouble'
Posted by Pieter Vander Vennet on 16 February 2023 in English. Last updated on 1 March 2023.10 days ago, I wrote an essay about Bing Map Builder and how it could be used to fork the OSM community.
I made a prediction there:
Assume that Bing Map Builder becomes a really decent and good editor and that about a third of the edits happen through Map Builder. Microsoft could then -at some time in the future- decide to let updates from Map Builder flow to Bing Maps first, and only let them flow towards OpenStreetMap at a later time, “to review them for quality”.
It seems that this prediction has become true already (1). In the discussion under my previous entry, people noticed that “no bing accounts appeared anymore” in the new to OSM-listing. Time to re-investigate!
So, what is the behaviour now? I drew a new building, clicked saved and… the building disappeared from my screen. When opening the network console, this network call proved my suspicions. The created data is now sent towards https://bing.com/mapbuilder/changeset/submit and contains the changeset data (and bit of extra information)
Changes made with Bing map builder are now sent to Bing, not to OpenStreetMap anymore.
(Edit 2023-03-01: Allison P pointed out in the comments that the building she drew now appeared into OSM, specifically in this changeset)
I’m curious what caused this and how this will play out further.
What caused this?
One hypothesis is that my essay caused them to take action and to switch over to their private backend to mitigate my critiques.
On the other hand, this might have been planned all along and have been rolled out just as planned.
Or maybe the truth is in the middle. It could have been planned, but rolled out sooner because of my essay.
In either case, I wasn’t contacted by their team - so I don’t know. Maybe I’ll hear how this went one day; maybe not.
Does this solve the issues I complained about?
The upside is that the community does not have to deal with pseudonymous accounts anymore. And the product “Bing Map Builder” now at least does what it says on the box.
The drawback is that this fractures the community further, just like I feared.
And the attribution to OpenStreetMap is still missing. As long as OSM-data is shown in Bing Map Builder, a clear attribution should be shown somewhere.
But the email delivery is fixed though. The first email I received arrived about half an hour after I published my article.
How will this play out further?
I’m wondering how this will evolve further. Will Bing upload the data that their contributors to OpenStreetMap - after a review and conflation? Or are we seeing a de-facto fork between the two datasets? Time will tell.
Some personal experiences about publishing the essay
My essay did make quite a splash and was shared widely. It got me on the frontpage of HackerNews (achievement unlocked) and my Mastodon account gained about 100 followers. The essay got translated and republished in French.
But most importantly, I got many positive reactions, saying that they “enjoyed the read”, found it “an interesting perspective”. Some wanted to take action by “reporting the Bing Map Builder account” (which has been blocked for quite a while), others found I was a bit “alarmist”. However, nearly everyone who commented agreed with my talking points. And I got no (very) negative reactions (e.g. no rude reactions or ad-hominems) - all messages were polite.
I didn’t receive official communication from neither the OSMF-board nor the Bing Map Builder team (yet?) - but a few OSMF-board members reacted via various channels. I trust that they are following up on this - I’m quite sure that the OSMF communicates with the Map Builder Team regularly to follow up the project and that this communication was ongoing before my essay. (For clarity, I had no contact with OSMF-members about the content of both essays as well).
Footnotes
(1) To be precise: the last part or this prediction has become true.
Discussion
Comment from pnorman on 16 February 2023 at 23:22
It’s always been sent to Bing directly. What appears to have changed is Bing isn’t taking those edits and submitting them to the OSM API.
I would watch for the building you mapped.
There’s a few possibilities - the data goes nowhere right now, - the data eventually appears on bing maps, or - the data appears in OSM eventually.
If it appears on Bing, then we can get the data from Bing under the ODbL and if we want, bring it into OSM.
Comment from Allison P on 23 February 2023 at 18:16
I mapped a building on Bing Map builder and it was brought to OSM the next day. The changeset comment claims it was manually reviewed, and apparently it was brought over using JOSM. https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/132926793
Comment from 快乐的老鼠宝宝 on 30 March 2024 at 12:25
Follow-up:
Map Builder seems to have been updated. This is a screenshot of its work. The interface has changed a lot from before.
But unfortunately, I still feel that the ediror are incomplete. I cannot see all the contributions my MS account has submitted to OSM in the past, whether they were approved or failed. I have been using the same MS account for various related tests since last year.
I also can’t try to see what OSM account my MS account is mapped to to determine whether my contribution has been intercepted by Bing.
Its editor has deleted many optional functions. Which is not terrible, but when I tried to draw an outline based on the top of the building and then move it to the bottom of the building, I found that it had no moving function (fortunately, I remembered the shortcut key M, So it worked)
I tested it and found that common iD shortcut keys such as W and G can be used, but Ctrl+Shift+H is deliberately blocked. Maybe MS doesn’t want us to know where the data is on OSM by seeing the history and element id.
What’s even more troublesome is that when saving, there seems to be a tendency to encourage uploading after completing a single edit. I wonder if this will cause many small edits that only change one building to appear in OSM that are difficult to track.
The worst part is that when you successfully save an edit, it doesn’t prompt you that your edit contributed to OSM, it just highlights Bing Map
I think this is very bad
The original comment can be found at https://t.me/osmchina/129204/132960
Comment from 快乐的老鼠宝宝 on 30 March 2024 at 12:30
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1267674441
But at least one thing that seems exciting is that MS’s review is very fast, and it really does what they said all the edits are posted back to OSM.
Comment from 快乐的老鼠宝宝 on 30 March 2024 at 12:39
Finally, the good news is that when you meet users who use Map Builder on the OSM main site, comments that recommend them to come to the main site instead of the Bing site will not be blocked.
Comment from 快乐的老鼠宝宝 on 1 April 2024 at 06:38
又一次补充
Since I haven’t seriously studied Map Builder, I’ve just added all my comments under Pieter Vander Vennet’s diary. I hope this doesn’t cause any inconvenience or disturbance to everyone.
It seems that in Map Builder, you can also add various custom tags and use iD presets, but this requires using the
1/2/3keys on the keyboard. Moreover, you can select and change tags only for new elements added via keystrokes, and there’s only one opportunity to choose and edit tags. Normally, you cannot reopen this panel.Additionally, if you edit enough content, it appears to require you to write a note, which I think might be similar to a changeset comment. Therefore, this changeset doesn’t seem to be directly edited into OSM; after clicking Save, the content in the editor returns to its unmodified state. However, when I tried adding just a small road immediately afterward, the edit was approved by Bing within 5 seconds and appeared on the real OSM.
It’s important to note that these “changesets that seem to have entered the review queue” are invisible even in Map Builder, reminiscent of China’s publish censorship.
I will continue tracking that edit which may require Microsoft employee review until it appears on OSM.
Comment from 快乐的老鼠宝宝 on 3 April 2024 at 10:05
Follow-up: All passed. It seems that some of the ones that triggered manual review will indeed take 2-3 days to appear in OSM.