Thanks for those valuable points.
I'm a layman, watching at OSM form the outside as a casual mapper and
user. You're an expert on the inside. My perspective is thus limited,
and also limited is the understanding of technical and infrastructure
challenges.
Regarding of comparing to government maps, I'm a bit sorry for putting
that as a strong focus, it varies very much between countries the
quality of this data and how it's presented etc. It's just that for me
it's a central reference tool when making maps, and the OSM tools is
actually preloaded with some of their maps.
As an amateur mapper I think it's a good idea to look at professional
cartography to see how naming are solved, and as I currently map
locations I am very familiar with myself I actually know the names and
how they are used, so I'm not just copying from the map. I maintain that
the naming issues the thread started with are very real and relevant,
and I think it is a problem that they cannot properly be addressed in
the current infrastructure. If manual placement of point tags with
manual prominence sorting rather than actual mapping of named areas is
the better choice in practice, so be it. I'm the layman, you're the
expert. I just see a problem and want it solved, somehow.
However if the problem is that there is actually no widespread interest
to improve in these areas or maybe even OSM shouldn't be used in this
way, then ok. I'll know. A key reason for starting this discussion was
to feel the pulse where this is going. If OSM is not meant to make
cartography to the level I desire, and my desire is just seen as a tiny
niche interest, then I know this is a dead end. It does diminish the
satisfaction of my own mapping as cartography is one of my driving
forces, but I cannot pretend that everyone is like me. I just hope that
there are some other cartography fans out there that also like to see a
move in this direction.
The thing about falling behind, I'm guilty of that narrative, and I've
mentioned google maps as one of the main threats (which I think is a
realistic scenario), but what it's actually about is that I think OSM
has become a bit too stagnant as does not seem to be able to adapt to
changed situations and may risk become obsolete in developed countries.
I put great importance to cartography here, which perhaps is a
misjudgment (ie maybe just my own personal niche interest), but the
reason I do it is because I believe many contributing mappers see that
as important and makes it more pleasing to contribute, and what OSM
needs is contributions, and especially so in Sweden where we are very
much behind indeed (not behind Google maps though, which still is kind
of bad...). I don't want to disrespect or anything like that, it's just
a genuine worry from someone who wants OSM to succeed and grow and
become good where I live.
About quickly throwing overboard all values, I think one problem is that
this community has become so sensitive that every hint of someone
suggesting that something needs a change is interpreted as a direct
threat. It's not my intention. I don't think we need to throw overboard
all values, but I think there is a need to make adjustment due to the
huge size and diversity of the community and the increased technical
complexity, and the need to involve and manage more commercial
interests. I think some centralized elements are required, and OSMF
board probably need to be somewhat more involved in strategy.
And I don't think we can use a process which takes 4 - 8 years to
implement basic features, if some of those basic features are still
missing 16 years into the project. I mean those names that brought up
all this are hundreds of years old. It's not a new fashionable thing
that a map needs to have one name for several entities. It's not a new
thing that hills and valleys of varying sizes have names, etc. Sure
there are things that are fashion of the day, and it's a good that the
overall structure is conservative. I just get a sense that regardless of
suggestion made, someone will immediately say in some way or another
that change is impossible, and to me that is a bit worrying.
/Anders
On 2020-11-07 15:34, Christoph Hormann wrote:
I wanted to quickly comment on two things where a misleading narrative
seems to be represented in the discussion here so far.
The first one is the idea that OSM community cartography is being held
back by the lack of computing power. It is not. The resources that
would be required to run various data preprocessings that have from
time to time been considered in map style development are absolutely
negligible compared to the ressources used by the OSMF for rendering
and tile delivery.
The problem is process development and maintainance. I have -
together with Jochen - from 2015 to 2019 operated
openstreetmapdata.com where we offered various preprocessed OSM data
for cartographic applications updated daily and we offered to develop
additional processes and extend this with additional processed data
offers in case people were willing to invest in that. The interest in
both the existing data sets as well as in developing new ones was
extremely sparse.
And any such process needs aintenance obviously - the costs of which
by far exceed those of the computing infrastructure.
I have during that time and since then done quite a bit of customized
cartographic data processing for map producers but none of them was
ever interested in actually financing open source process development
in that domain. Hence the work i have done there stays proprietary
technology.
The bottom line is neither in the hobbyist OSM community nor among
commercial OSM data users is there a substantial interest in investing
in technologically advancing quality in automated rule based
cartography based on generic geodata like in OSM. The bays and
straits Frederik discusses are a good example. Both mappers and
corporate data users seem much more keen in crowd sourcing the drawing
of labeling polygons to the cheap labor of the mapping community than
to invest into development and maintenance of open source processes to
derive importance rating and labeling geometries from bay and strait
nodes and coastline data. The irony is that compared to some other
problems of automated cartography based on OSM data (river networks
just to mention one) this is not even close to rocket science. With a
10-20k investment you could achieve quite a lot in this field (which
is already now far less than the sum of work hours at minimum wage
invested by mappers into drawing and maintaining labeling polygons).
This is just an example of course - there are many other fields.
The second thing i want to comment on is the yet again resurfacing
story that OSM is falling behind compared to <pick your favorite hype
of the day technology/company/organization/etc.> - in this case
government mapping. And therefore we all quickly need to throw
overboard all values and traditions of the project and urgently become
more like <Wikipedia/Corporation project X/Anglo-American tech project
Y>.
Such calls are universally based on a lack of understanding of what
OpenStreetMap is and how OSM became what it is today. Yes,
OpenStreetMap has deficits it needs to improve on (i discussed one of
them above) but throwing overboard valuable lessons learned from the
past and throwing ourselves at what seems to be the hype of the day is
not going to solve anything. Focusing on what OSM is good at and what
has made and makes it successful as a social project, the cooperative
collection of verifiable local geographic knowledge, is the key. That
requires a certain technological, communicative and yes, also
cartographic context and to be and stay avant-garde in that context.
But trying to imitate for example what government mapping agencies do
(who are universally still pretty much stuck in mere 1:1
digitalization of traditional pre-digital processes), or on other
fronts: what big corporate map producers do for cost efficient
production of mediocre maps for social media platform customers who
don't care a bit about cartographic quality, is definitely not a long
term winning strategy to do that.
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