Tom Chance wrote: > I also cannot understand comments such as Richard's, which arise > every time somebody wants to add additional data that they consider > valuable. Compared to the days of just mapping roads, many cities > today are a dense mass of addressed buildings, metadata-to-the- > eyeballs roads and every amenity known to man. Should we pity > the poor sod who tries to edit that?
Yes, we should, and I do. To quote Christian Quest on talk@ just a few minutes ago: > After trying to contaminate a couple of friends with the OSM > virus, the biggest problem I think we have comes from the > complexity of the editors (even P2) multiplied by the growing > data density. > > The growing amount of data makes editing looking more difficult > and newcomers are afraid of breaking existing stuff. Already, if you zoom all the way into a densely mapped part of London and click 'Edit', you will either boggle your browser or wait an unacceptably long time for the data to load - simply because there is so much stuff there. Or if you go into a part of the countryside where the roads are comingled with admin boundaries plus landuse and a hefty sprinkling of long-distance foot and cycle routes on top, you will be forever tripping over yourself with shared nodes, accidental junctions, layer ordering and heaven knows what. There are possible things that can be done in the editor software to address these but they are seriously bloody hard (believe me, I've spent a couple of years worrying about them), and no-one is lining up to code them. In reality, the majority of editor-developer time in the past few years has gone towards broadly reimplementing the same tool in a succession of languages, or to providing ever more advanced features for the advanced users. Which is why I pity the poor sodding newbies. Complex tagging abstractions and dense data are making OSM editing harder every month, and the tools/API aren't keeping up. If you don't believe me, hang out in #osm-gb some time and follow the "newbies' first edit" notifier: people are seriously floundering right now. The excellent UI work that Mapbox are putting into iD will go a long way towards addressing this, but it can't solve the entire problem - no client can. Personally I'm coming to suspect that something layer-like in API 0.7 is the only way past this, much though our traditional pride against accepting anything invented by GIS people might make it hard to swallow. And, as with editors, we're not exactly swimming in developers in this area. Until then, the advanced mappers must share in OSM's collective responsibility to keep the project editable by newbies. That's why I believe widespread farm landuse mapping in the countryside is an actively harmful indulgence. cheers Richard -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Marking-landuse-and-field-boundaries-tp5742119p5742192.html Sent from the Great Britain mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
