[Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?
Hello everyone, I would like to suggest as a sort of Project of the week for the UK for people to pick a random town or village somewhere in the UK that so far has poor coverage and trace it's roads from OS OpenData StreetView. Despite the various claims over the years that the UK road will be road complete by the end of the year, the UK is still a far distance off of that target. I have heard the numbers that so far we have on the order of 50% of named roads (people who are working on OS - OSM comparisons please correct me if I am wrong). Which is by no means a small feat of achieving, but also not as high as one would like it to be. So let us try and accelerate this a bit by everyone picking a small random town or village somewhere in the UK and trace the roads from StreetView. It probably only takes about 10 - 20 minutes for a small village and even a small town isn't too bad to do (if the weather is bad and you can't go out). So with the help of OS data, we can get a big step closer to where we would like to be and use it as a basis to continue to improve beyond the quality of OS data or any other commercial map provider. (If you are convinced already, then no need to read the rest of the email) I know that many people are opposed to armchair mapping or imports (and btw I am not proposing a full scale import here, but manual tracing instead) and so I'd like to counter some of the arguments most likely going to be brought up against this sort of non local tracing: 1) OS data might have mistakes, be outdated and generally not as good as what OSM aims for: Yes, no doubt OS has errors and can be outdated in many places by a couple of years ( I have found more than enough of those myself). Furthermore, all of the OS products released lack many of the properties we are interested in like one way roads, turn and other restrictions, POIs, foot and cycle ways and all the other things that make OSM data such a rich and valuable dataset. So yes, the OS data will clearly not replace any of the traditional OSM surveying techniques or be the end of things. But it can be a great basis to build upon. As a comparison, have a look (assuming you have a timecapsal ;-)) at what the data of e.g. central London looked like in 2007. It already had surprisingly many roads, but hardly any POIs or other properties that we aim for now. Most of that came later in many iterations of improvement. A single pass of OSM surveying is not any better than the OS data per se. Also given that the errors introduced by tracing OS data are exactly the same type of errors introduced by manual OSM surveying, i.e. misspellings in roads, missing roads, outdated roads, ... We need to have the tools to deal with this kind of maintenance anyway. It is the iterations that make OSM data what it is, not the first pass ground survey. Creating a blanket base layer from OS data allows us to much better focus on the aspects that do distinguish us from every other map data provider with having to waste as little as possible resources on the stuff everyone else has too. 2) large scale imports and tracing hinders community growth: This perhaps is the more important of the two arguments, as indeed what distinguishes us from everyone else is the community and without the community and its constant iterations and improvements, OSM data will bit rot just as much as all other data. However I don't think there is any clear evidence either way of what non local mapping does to communities and it remains hotly debated. The negative effects claimed are usually of the form a) The area looks complete, there is nothing more to do, so why bother. Or, it isn't as much fun to add a POI than a whole new village on a blank canvas. b) I put in all this effort into mapping an area and along comes an import and steam rollers all this into a mess, I am leaving. c) imports introduce a new class of bugs, e.g. duplicate nodes or broken connectivity that OSM mappers wouldn't so we don't have the tools to deal with these sort of errors correctly. b) and c) are specific to imports and thus manual tracing shouldn't suffer the same issues. a) may be the case, but it is clearly a case that we need to be able to deal with anyway, as more and more areas become complete by them selves. And looking at the better mapped areas, like Germany or some of the UK cities, I don't think there is any evidence that you can't attract new comers into already mapped areas. It is potentially also offset by all those people who simple want to use the data for something like embed a map into their blog or use OSM data on their Garmin, their phone, their game, their ... and will fix the odd bug they discover while doing so, but can't really as it simply isn't complete enough yet. Other examples of remote mapping have also been fairly successful. The most obvious one was Haiti. It's initial phase was entirely arm chair mapping and had no
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?
Kai, I think this is a good idea, and a very well presented argument - a push to get UK OSM coverage up would make the uk dataset more useful (more chance of being able to search for an address etc.). I think it would be worth treating a 'blind' tracing (as opposed to tracing an area that you know, but have not surveyed) a bit like an import and adding a 'verified=no' tag. Then when someone on the ground visits the area they can update the 'verified' tag - we could even create a map overlay to highlight the unverified areas to encourage 'on the ground' surveys to add the extra detail that makes OSM maps more interesting than others. Regards Graham. On 6 June 2010 12:07, Kai Krueger kakrue...@gmail.com wrote: Hello everyone, I would like to suggest as a sort of Project of the week for the UK for people to pick a random town or village somewhere in the UK that so far has poor coverage and trace it's roads from OS OpenData StreetView. Despite the various claims over the years that the UK road will be road complete by the end of the year, the UK is still a far distance off of that target. I have heard the numbers that so far we have on the order of 50% of named roads (people who are working on OS - OSM comparisons please correct me if I am wrong). Which is by no means a small feat of achieving, but also not as high as one would like it to be. So let us try and accelerate this a bit by everyone picking a small random town or village somewhere in the UK and trace the roads from StreetView. It probably only takes about 10 - 20 minutes for a small village and even a small town isn't too bad to do (if the weather is bad and you can't go out). So with the help of OS data, we can get a big step closer to where we would like to be and use it as a basis to continue to improve beyond the quality of OS data or any other commercial map provider. (If you are convinced already, then no need to read the rest of the email) I know that many people are opposed to armchair mapping or imports (and btw I am not proposing a full scale import here, but manual tracing instead) and so I'd like to counter some of the arguments most likely going to be brought up against this sort of non local tracing: 1) OS data might have mistakes, be outdated and generally not as good as what OSM aims for: Yes, no doubt OS has errors and can be outdated in many places by a couple of years ( I have found more than enough of those myself). Furthermore, all of the OS products released lack many of the properties we are interested in like one way roads, turn and other restrictions, POIs, foot and cycle ways and all the other things that make OSM data such a rich and valuable dataset. So yes, the OS data will clearly not replace any of the traditional OSM surveying techniques or be the end of things. But it can be a great basis to build upon. As a comparison, have a look (assuming you have a timecapsal ;-)) at what the data of e.g. central London looked like in 2007. It already had surprisingly many roads, but hardly any POIs or other properties that we aim for now. Most of that came later in many iterations of improvement. A single pass of OSM surveying is not any better than the OS data per se. Also given that the errors introduced by tracing OS data are exactly the same type of errors introduced by manual OSM surveying, i.e. misspellings in roads, missing roads, outdated roads, ... We need to have the tools to deal with this kind of maintenance anyway. It is the iterations that make OSM data what it is, not the first pass ground survey. Creating a blanket base layer from OS data allows us to much better focus on the aspects that do distinguish us from every other map data provider with having to waste as little as possible resources on the stuff everyone else has too. 2) large scale imports and tracing hinders community growth: This perhaps is the more important of the two arguments, as indeed what distinguishes us from everyone else is the community and without the community and its constant iterations and improvements, OSM data will bit rot just as much as all other data. However I don't think there is any clear evidence either way of what non local mapping does to communities and it remains hotly debated. The negative effects claimed are usually of the form a) The area looks complete, there is nothing more to do, so why bother. Or, it isn't as much fun to add a POI than a whole new village on a blank canvas. b) I put in all this effort into mapping an area and along comes an import and steam rollers all this into a mess, I am leaving. c) imports introduce a new class of bugs, e.g. duplicate nodes or broken connectivity that OSM mappers wouldn't so we don't have the tools to deal with these sort of errors correctly. b) and c) are specific to imports and thus manual tracing shouldn't suffer the same issues. a) may be the case, but it is clearly a case that we need to be
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?
If you are tracing from StreetView please, please, please properly source your ways: source=OS_OpenData_StreetView http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey_Opendata#Attributing_OS Tim --- On Sun, 6/6/10, Kai Krueger kakrue...@gmail.com wrote: From: Kai Krueger kakrue...@gmail.com Subject: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV? To: 'talk-gb' talk-gb@openstreetmap.org Date: Sunday, 6 June, 2010, 12:07 Hello everyone, I would like to suggest as a sort of Project of the week for the UK for people to pick a random town or village somewhere in the UK that so far has poor coverage and trace it's roads from OS OpenData StreetView. Despite the various claims over the years that the UK road will be road complete by the end of the year, the UK is still a far distance off of that target. I have heard the numbers that so far we have on the order of 50% of named roads (people who are working on OS - OSM comparisons please correct me if I am wrong). Which is by no means a small feat of achieving, but also not as high as one would like it to be. So let us try and accelerate this a bit by everyone picking a small random town or village somewhere in the UK and trace the roads from StreetView. It probably only takes about 10 - 20 minutes for a small village and even a small town isn't too bad to do (if the weather is bad and you can't go out). So with the help of OS data, we can get a big step closer to where we would like to be and use it as a basis to continue to improve beyond the quality of OS data or any other commercial map provider. (If you are convinced already, then no need to read the rest of the email) I know that many people are opposed to armchair mapping or imports (and btw I am not proposing a full scale import here, but manual tracing instead) and so I'd like to counter some of the arguments most likely going to be brought up against this sort of non local tracing: 1) OS data might have mistakes, be outdated and generally not as good as what OSM aims for: Yes, no doubt OS has errors and can be outdated in many places by a couple of years ( I have found more than enough of those myself). Furthermore, all of the OS products released lack many of the properties we are interested in like one way roads, turn and other restrictions, POIs, foot and cycle ways and all the other things that make OSM data such a rich and valuable dataset. So yes, the OS data will clearly not replace any of the traditional OSM surveying techniques or be the end of things. But it can be a great basis to build upon. As a comparison, have a look (assuming you have a timecapsal ;-)) at what the data of e.g. central London looked like in 2007. It already had surprisingly many roads, but hardly any POIs or other properties that we aim for now. Most of that came later in many iterations of improvement. A single pass of OSM surveying is not any better than the OS data per se. Also given that the errors introduced by tracing OS data are exactly the same type of errors introduced by manual OSM surveying, i.e. misspellings in roads, missing roads, outdated roads, ... We need to have the tools to deal with this kind of maintenance anyway. It is the iterations that make OSM data what it is, not the first pass ground survey. Creating a blanket base layer from OS data allows us to much better focus on the aspects that do distinguish us from every other map data provider with having to waste as little as possible resources on the stuff everyone else has too. 2) large scale imports and tracing hinders community growth: This perhaps is the more important of the two arguments, as indeed what distinguishes us from everyone else is the community and without the community and its constant iterations and improvements, OSM data will bit rot just as much as all other data. However I don't think there is any clear evidence either way of what non local mapping does to communities and it remains hotly debated. The negative effects claimed are usually of the form a) The area looks complete, there is nothing more to do, so why bother. Or, it isn't as much fun to add a POI than a whole new village on a blank canvas. b) I put in all this effort into mapping an area and along comes an import and steam rollers all this into a mess, I am leaving. c) imports introduce a new class of bugs, e.g. duplicate nodes or broken connectivity that OSM mappers wouldn't so we don't have the tools to deal with these sort of errors correctly. b) and c) are specific to imports and thus manual tracing shouldn't suffer the same issues. a) may be the case, but it is clearly a case that we need to be able to deal with anyway, as more and more areas become complete by them selves. And looking at the better mapped areas, like Germany or some of the UK cities, I don't think there is any evidence that you can't attract new comers into already mapped areas. It is potentially also offset by
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?
We've never bothered adding verified=no for tracing from Yahoo maps with Potlatch, or adding new roads in the city with only very rough GPS accuracy, or any of the other sources of OSM data, many of which are often worse in quality than the Ordnance Survey data (which, from all I've seen, is really very good). So we need not worry too much about marking objects as 'unclean' just because they were traced from OS. They are no more likely to need re-surveying than anything else on the map. However, where the OS data is conflicting with data already on the map, of course it makes sense to tag FIXME or similar to solve the puzzle on the ground. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?
I've support this 'project of the week' and I've already tested the idea in a small area. If you look around the web for critical views on Openstreetmap it does look like the big chunks of missing streets puts people off. A few opinions to add. 1. If you know how to convert the shapefile, use Vector Map District instead of Streetview. [Link to Converting Guidehttp://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Using_OS_Shapefiles ] 2. Use the newly created 'Ito _ OS locator layer' to get street names. Do this for areas that appear to have been completely 'street mapped'. [link to using Ito layer http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Using_OS_Locator_files] 3. Use the streetview layer as final comparison Jason ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?
Kai Krueger wrote: So let us try and accelerate this a bit by everyone picking a small random town or village somewhere in the UK and trace the roads from StreetView. How about concentrating on the stuff that you can't get from a ground survey? Woodland, most waterways, that sort of thing... Also, while the offset in the StreetView data is tiny compared to e.g. NPE, I'd suggest picking areas where it's possible to check the alignment of the background (perhaps from a couple of perpendicular major roads with lots of traces on). ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?
I like the idea for a project of the week using OS OpenData StreetView, but would suggest that before we add lots of new roads we work hard to get roads which are already in OSM properly named. Firstly it is improving data which is already there, secondly it using a second, independent, data source. Not a patch on ground survey, but at least it means that editors of the data have to engage with the data sources and their discrepancies. I would not be happy at OSM becoming a largely a subset of Ordnance Survey data without more thought (but also see below). As for the status of noname roads, I have named perhaps 2000 or so in West London and Merseyside in the past few weeks. There are still substantial parts of the South East and North West with many unnamed roads. I have not estimated the number, but its still in the thousands. Unfortunately the noname map layer on the website has not been updated (along with other Cloudmade maps), so I'd suggest using beta.letuffe.org which has a noname overlay (link is to Wigan area). It is important not to forget that a mass import of the VectorMap District roads named from Locator will become possible within the next six months. I'm sure several people are looking at a) how to accurately name the VMD roads from Locator ; and b) how to find only those roads which are not already in OSM (e.g., by using the techniques of the French CORINE project). Once viable technical solutions to these issues are available we will be able to import ALL the missing roads SHOULD we wish to. Manual tracing of StreetView data should be considered in this context. Personally, I don't think mass imports of VectorMap District road data should be contemplated, at least for 6 months or so, for all the usual reasons (Pottery, Imports and the Community). However, availability outwith the planet database of those roads in VectorMap District and not in OSM could be used to enhance downstream applications, such as Garmin extracts, and specific map renders. In other words we should be able to generate GB road-complete products without risking some of the known effects on community building of armchair mapping. I think there is plenty of scope to think of other 'added-value' projects with the StreetView data, these are some off the top of my head: * Getting all schools in to coincide with publication of league tables (its another data source to cross-check) * Mapping all professional football grounds (see for instance Blundell Park) * Ditto for other sports (e.g., crags used for climbing, horse racecourses, ...). * Mapping landuse=residential for areas without streets (shapes can be used as a guide to poorly mapped areas) * Get all churches tagged with man_made=tower or man_made=spire if applicable so that we can do OSGB like renders * Get all bridges tagged and marked for major waterways. Bridges across large rivers are surprisingly poorly mapped. It ought to be possible to identify these and make our existing data better. * Replace larger expanses of water mapped from NPE or Yahoo with OSSV or OS VDM.I hope these thoughts are not too controversial. I must add that I am not a zealot for the no import cause, but I do recognise that there is a reasonable case for it. Regards, Jerry Clough From: Kai Krueger kakrue...@gmail.com To: talk-gb talk-gb@openstreetmap.org Sent: Sun, 6 June, 2010 12:07:33 Subject: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV? Hello everyone, I would like to suggest as a sort of Project of the week for the UK for people to pick a random town or village somewhere in the UK that so far has poor coverage and trace it's roads from OS OpenData StreetView. Despite the various claims over the years that the UK road will be road complete by the end of the year, the UK is still a far distance off of that target. I have heard the numbers that so far we have on the order of 50% of named roads (people who are working on OS - OSM comparisons please correct me if I am wrong). Which is by no means a small feat of achieving, but also not as high as one would like it to be. So let us try and accelerate this a bit by everyone picking a small random town or village somewhere in the UK and trace the roads from StreetView. It probably only takes about 10 - 20 minutes for a small village and even a small town isn't too bad to do (if the weather is bad and you can't go out). So with the help of OS data, we can get a big step closer to where we would like to be and use it as a basis to continue to improve beyond the quality of OS data or any other commercial map provider. (If you are convinced already, then no need to read the rest of the email) I know that many people are opposed to armchair mapping or imports (and btw I am not proposing a full scale import here, but manual tracing instead) and so I'd like to counter some
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?
Hi, Kai Krueger wrote: I would like to suggest as a sort of Project of the week for the UK for people to pick a random town or village somewhere in the UK that so far has poor coverage and trace it's roads from OS OpenData StreetView. Is anybody sure that the OS's attribution requirements are adequately addressed by current practice, and when moving to ODbL later? Under ODbL it will be possible to use non-substantial amounts of data from OSM without any attribution (this is not disputed), and furthermore (this is disputed and the following is only the opinion of myself plus at least one member of the licensing working group) it will be possible to create a produced work from OSM data and license that under a license that does not require attribution, so attribution can become lost down the line. Before anyone starts massively using OS data for anything else than a comparison, I strongly suggest to get a very clear view of this, either by having the OS say yes ok or at least getting a statement from our own licensing working group. Because doing large-scale tracing and later having to remove it all sucks. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09 E008°23'33 ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?, (Kai Krueger)
At risk of being a fly in the ointment, judging by the largely favourable responses to this idea, I for one would like to register myself as -1. Rant Please don't map an area if you are not familiar with it. I have done some armchair mapping, but only where I am familiar with the area, and feel I can add value to the data I am entering. If you are that desperate for a 'complete' map, go out and do more surveying, or just use OS or other commercially available products. I just feel that blatant, blind copying of OS data is prostituting what I thought Open Street Map was meant to be about./Rant OK, I've got my tin hat on: standing by for incoming... ;-) Phil. talk-gb-requ...@openstreetmap.org wrote: -- Message: 1 Date: Sun, 06 Jun 2010 12:07:33 +0100 From: Kai Krueger kakrue...@gmail.com Subject: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV? To: 'talk-gb' talk-gb@openstreetmap.org Message-ID: 4c0b8175.30...@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Hello everyone, I would like to suggest as a sort of Project of the week for the UK for people to pick a random town or village somewhere in the UK that so far has poor coverage and trace it's roads from OS OpenData StreetView. Despite the various claims over the years that the UK road will be road complete by the end of the year, the UK is still a far distance off of that target. I have heard the numbers that so far we have on the order of 50% of named roads (people who are working on OS - OSM comparisons please correct me if I am wrong). Which is by no means a small feat of achieving, but also not as high as one would like it to be. So let us try and accelerate this a bit by everyone picking a small random town or village somewhere in the UK and trace the roads from StreetView. It probably only takes about 10 - 20 minutes for a small village and even a small town isn't too bad to do (if the weather is bad and you can't go out). So with the help of OS data, we can get a big step closer to where we would like to be and use it as a basis to continue to improve beyond the quality of OS data or any other commercial map provider. (If you are convinced already, then no need to read the rest of the email) I know that many people are opposed to armchair mapping or imports (and btw I am not proposing a full scale import here, but manual tracing instead) and so I'd like to counter some of the arguments most likely going to be brought up against this sort of non local tracing: 1) OS data might have mistakes, be outdated and generally not as good as what OSM aims for: Yes, no doubt OS has errors and can be outdated in many places by a couple of years ( I have found more than enough of those myself). Furthermore, all of the OS products released lack many of the properties we are interested in like one way roads, turn and other restrictions, POIs, foot and cycle ways and all the other things that make OSM data such a rich and valuable dataset. So yes, the OS data will clearly not replace any of the traditional OSM surveying techniques or be the end of things. But it can be a great basis to build upon. As a comparison, have a look (assuming you have a timecapsal ;-)) at what the data of e.g. central London looked like in 2007. It already had surprisingly many roads, but hardly any POIs or other properties that we aim for now. Most of that came later in many iterations of improvement. A single pass of OSM surveying is not any better than the OS data per se. Also given that the errors introduced by tracing OS data are exactly the same type of errors introduced by manual OSM surveying, i.e. misspellings in roads, missing roads, outdated roads, ... We need to have the tools to deal with this kind of maintenance anyway. It is the iterations that make OSM data what it is, not the first pass ground survey. Creating a blanket base layer from OS data allows us to much better focus on the aspects that do distinguish us from every other map data provider with having to waste as little as possible resources on the stuff everyone else has too. 2) large scale imports and tracing hinders community growth: This perhaps is the more important of the two arguments, as indeed what distinguishes us from everyone else is the community and without the community and its constant iterations and improvements, OSM data will bit rot just as much as all other data. However I don't think there is any clear evidence either way of what non local mapping does to communities and it remains hotly debated. The negative effects claimed are usually of the form a) The area looks complete, there is nothing more to do, so why bother. Or, it isn't as much fun to add a POI than a whole new village on a blank canvas. b) I put in all this effort into mapping an area
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?, (Kai Krueger)
+1... or -1 as well? not sure how the arithmetic of these is supposed to work. anyway, i agree with phil. cheers, matt On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 10:13 PM, Phil James peerja...@googlemail.com wrote: At risk of being a fly in the ointment, judging by the largely favourable responses to this idea, I for one would like to register myself as -1. Rant Please don't map an area if you are not familiar with it. I have done some armchair mapping, but only where I am familiar with the area, and feel I can add value to the data I am entering. If you are that desperate for a 'complete' map, go out and do more surveying, or just use OS or other commercially available products. I just feel that blatant, blind copying of OS data is prostituting what I thought Open Street Map was meant to be about./Rant OK, I've got my tin hat on: standing by for incoming... ;-) Phil. talk-gb-requ...@openstreetmap.org wrote: -- Message: 1 Date: Sun, 06 Jun 2010 12:07:33 +0100 From: Kai Krueger kakrue...@gmail.com Subject: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV? To: 'talk-gb' talk-gb@openstreetmap.org Message-ID: 4c0b8175.30...@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Hello everyone, I would like to suggest as a sort of Project of the week for the UK for people to pick a random town or village somewhere in the UK that so far has poor coverage and trace it's roads from OS OpenData StreetView. Despite the various claims over the years that the UK road will be road complete by the end of the year, the UK is still a far distance off of that target. I have heard the numbers that so far we have on the order of 50% of named roads (people who are working on OS - OSM comparisons please correct me if I am wrong). Which is by no means a small feat of achieving, but also not as high as one would like it to be. So let us try and accelerate this a bit by everyone picking a small random town or village somewhere in the UK and trace the roads from StreetView. It probably only takes about 10 - 20 minutes for a small village and even a small town isn't too bad to do (if the weather is bad and you can't go out). So with the help of OS data, we can get a big step closer to where we would like to be and use it as a basis to continue to improve beyond the quality of OS data or any other commercial map provider. (If you are convinced already, then no need to read the rest of the email) I know that many people are opposed to armchair mapping or imports (and btw I am not proposing a full scale import here, but manual tracing instead) and so I'd like to counter some of the arguments most likely going to be brought up against this sort of non local tracing: 1) OS data might have mistakes, be outdated and generally not as good as what OSM aims for: Yes, no doubt OS has errors and can be outdated in many places by a couple of years ( I have found more than enough of those myself). Furthermore, all of the OS products released lack many of the properties we are interested in like one way roads, turn and other restrictions, POIs, foot and cycle ways and all the other things that make OSM data such a rich and valuable dataset. So yes, the OS data will clearly not replace any of the traditional OSM surveying techniques or be the end of things. But it can be a great basis to build upon. As a comparison, have a look (assuming you have a timecapsal ;-)) at what the data of e.g. central London looked like in 2007. It already had surprisingly many roads, but hardly any POIs or other properties that we aim for now. Most of that came later in many iterations of improvement. A single pass of OSM surveying is not any better than the OS data per se. Also given that the errors introduced by tracing OS data are exactly the same type of errors introduced by manual OSM surveying, i.e. misspellings in roads, missing roads, outdated roads, ... We need to have the tools to deal with this kind of maintenance anyway. It is the iterations that make OSM data what it is, not the first pass ground survey. Creating a blanket base layer from OS data allows us to much better focus on the aspects that do distinguish us from every other map data provider with having to waste as little as possible resources on the stuff everyone else has too. 2) large scale imports and tracing hinders community growth: This perhaps is the more important of the two arguments, as indeed what distinguishes us from everyone else is the community and without the community and its constant iterations and improvements, OSM data will bit rot just as much as all other data. However I don't think there is any clear evidence either way of what non local mapping does to communities and it remains hotly debated. The negative effects claimed are usually of the form a) The area looks complete, there is nothing more
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?, (Kai Krueger)
On 6 June 2010 22:13, Phil James peerja...@googlemail.com wrote: ...I just feel that blatant, blind copying of OS data is prostituting what I thought Open Street Map was meant to be about./Rant OK, I've got my tin hat on: standing by for incoming... ;-) Phil. I've got a lot of sympathy for that view. The UK map owes a huge amount to individuals trudging along the streets and footpaths/paths/etc of Britain. Mapping Parties have created community, and were responsible for the detailed mapping of many areas. But. OpenStreetMap is a project to create and provide free geographic data, such as streets maps, to anyone who wants them. That is why I contribute. Blatant, blind, copying of OS Data allows us to provide more detailed geographic data which satisfies the aim of the project. The OS data is been treated as a replacement and hard work isnt being deleted. The OS data is only being used to add data that is not currently present, or to mark up blunders. I have no emotional attachment to the data gathering process, whether it be Mapping Parties, Yahoo tracing, or imports. They are simply a means to an end, to be discarded if a better method comes along. The big question is whether importing OS Data means we'll never see the addition of data normally providing by OpenStreetMap streetwalkers. I'd like to think that an almost complete Streetmap will mean a massive increase in use of OpenStreetMap and those new users will add the missing POI. Jason ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK Project of the week - trace a village off of OSSV?, (Kai Krueger)
On 7 June 2010 05:18, Jason Cunningham jamicu...@googlemail.com wrote: The OS data is been treated as a replacement and hard work isnt being deleted. The OS data is only being used to add data that is not currently present, or to mark up blunders. Oops, That should have read The OS data is not being treated as a replacement. Thats what happens if you been up all night looking for bats! I'm now now off to get a good days sleep. Jason ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
