When you use people whose first interest isn't mapping in large numbers you need to keep it simple. I've used little old ladies in electric wheel chairs before now to take photographs of specific locations on the other side of the Atlantic. Worked fine but they do get confused easily so if something appears to be 30 meters from where they think it is the amount of hand holding goes up quite sharply and that is support time I can't afford. Once you have the basic streets in roughly the right place tagging becomes easier and a lot more things become possible. A lot of my work has been in the realm of simplifying fairly complex things so they can be used by the masses to get a very reasonable return on investment, this does not need to be directly in monetary values but can be, for example I changed a typeface once which saved about a $1,000,000 a year. With OSM I can see some very good opportunities for its use once it reaches a certain level of reliability of information.
The three items that were more than 100 meters out have been corrected as have most of the sections of road that were omitted from the import because one road on the OSM map was up to 100 meters away from where it should be. I don't have the time or resources to go and verify large areas of Ottawa, I can carry a GPS with me when I pop out which gives data at low marginal cost but that's probably the limit of it. My estimate of the Ottawa map getting sorted out is probably two years assuming more people get involved. Given the large amount of verification of the old OSM data and the clean up work to be done on the boundaries of the Geobase / OSM data merge my contribution will be insignificant. Mind you if you look carefully you'll find two more footpaths have been added. I am associated with at least one project in sourceforge and on another freeware project my work has been downloaded well over 500,000 times so I am familiar with making items that do not have to be purchased. On those projects I made use of others to verify the quality. Cheerio John 2009/10/29 James Ewen <ve6...@gmail.com>: > On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 2:32 PM, John Whelan <jwhelan0...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> So it looks as if we'll just have to wait until the >> mess gets straighten out. > > Do you have any idea what happens if we ALL take that attitude? There > is no "them" in OSM, it's an "us" type community. > >> I found two on OSM, one wasn't active and the other, Marc Sensei, didn't >> respond. > > Have you given him time to check his incoming mail and respond? It is > easy to miss items sitting in the OSM inbox, and if the user uses JOSM > or another offline mapping method, they might not log onto OSM for > extended periods of time. > > >> My premise of just dropping in the Geobase data was based on the >> fact I could only identify two other Ottawa mappers. So it look as if not >> much had been done so far especially on the GPS side. Thus doing the job >> quickly would save any more effort until we ended up with the clean map. > > Just for reference, here's what the OSM map looks like when there's > "not much being done" in an area. > > http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=65.2780&lon=-126.7932&zoom=17 > > This link is for Norman Wells, NWT. There are no local mappers in the > area. If you zoom out, you'll find the MacKenzie River which was > created by a JOSM Lakewalker plugin on Feb 10, 2009. If no one works > in the area, nothing happens. The Ottawa area looks like it has much > more information than Norman Wells, so we have to assume that the OSM > community has actually been working in the area. History information > backs up that assumption. > >> Then the idea was given a decent set of roads to leverage some of the groups >> I come across on the planning side to add tags. I don't think the Ottawa >> OSM map is mature enough to suggest it to them at this point in time with >> its missing segments of roads etc. Perhaps in a couple of years when its >> straighten out. > > It may never become mature enough then if everyone waits for "magic" to > happen. > >> Bye the way someone made a comment that I'd only mentioned two items being >> over 100 meters off. It's now at least three and they were off in different >> directions. All were in locations with clear sky above, I assume they were >> satellite tracings. > > Have you corrected these items? If not, then when you look at them in > a couple years, they might still be located in the wrong place. > > Do you yet understand that OSM is a community project, and it takes > investment by the community to create a usable product. > > If you don't want to invest the time and effort to help further the > project, then you might just want to look at investing your cash into > a commercial mapping solution. Nothing is free... OSM espouses to be > "free as in speech", but someone has to invest the effort in making > the noise... by helping to map the area, you are making the noise that > others can listen to. If you sit on your hands and wait, it takes that > much longer for everyone else to produce a product for your > consumption. > > Perhaps your professional background is getting in the way of > understanding that not everything in the world is a product that is > produced by someone else, and simply purchased when needed. Sometimes > you have to roll up your sleeves and help yourself. > > I found a footpath that you added to the map, so I know that you know > how this works. > > James > VE6SRV > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-ca mailing list > Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca > _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
