As already noted, quality is in the eye of the beholder. That said, there are some objective quality indicators such as positional accuracy, completeness, resolution. I summarized this in a paper a few years ago from another source, where I also introduced the notion of 'crowd quality' in an academic attempt to capture specific quality considerations for crowdsourced geospatial data: http://www.giscience2010.org/pdfs/paper_213.pdf
Not much of an academic, I later picked this up in a more pragmatic manner to create the notion of data temperature I presented at SOTM US 2011: http://oegeo.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/taking-the-temperature-of-local-openstreetmap-communities/ Someone else mentioned we need more mappers. There is truth to that but we also need to care about building out the community: how do we reduce the churn rate, or in other words how to keep mappers involved and motivated to continue mapping? how do we nurture the power mappers, those 5% who create 80% or more of the map data - especially in light of the large amounts of new mappers coming in? and finally how do we make local communities work? Latter is super important because great local data (transit, businesses, addresses) is key to the usefulness (hey, another way of thinking about quality!) of OSM. Great local data is something you only get if folks who know a place, folks with different interests and from different walks of life, work on the map together. Currently that happens in too few places. I think one of the most important keys to making good OSM data great lies in figuring out how to build strong local communities. In Europe, we have that down.It all started with that. Get together and map. Have fun, figure it out together. While traveling in Germany recently, I did not have to go online once to find my way, my hotel, restaurant, bus stop etc. The map is *that good*. Sure, there are more mappers per sqm there. But it is just as much about people getting together, motivating each other, collaborating on more complex mapping tasks (stuff like transit relations[1]). We have a long way to go still in the US, and we may need a different approach than Europe. I think I just wrote half of one of my SOTM US talk. Thanks Frederic ;) hth Martijn [1] http://www.overpass-api.de/api/sketch-line?network=VBB&ref=M1&operator= On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Richard Welty <rwe...@averillpark.net>wrote: > On 5/31/13 3:15 PM, Frederic Julien wrote: > >> Dear all, >> >> I'm working on a presentation and interested to hear your thoughts. What >> are the top 2-3 changes that could improve OSM data quality? That could be >> processes, tools, methods, training, peer review, attributes, etc. >> >> at one level, i agree with Clifford Snow's comment that first you need > to define data quality. > > at another level, i think that we can talk about the following: > > 1) consistency in tagging. editor improvements, better documentation, > better > training materials can all help with this > > 2) improved processes and controls for data import (this is work that is > happening > on the US import committee). there are a lot of imports of the past > that suffer > from Quality Control issues, and lots of imports that never should > have been > done because of problems with the data quality. > > 3) in the US (and you did ask on talk-us), identifying and dealing with > the shaky > Tiger data from the 2007 tiger import. some of this has been done, but > it's an > ongoing effort and is one of those things that is easier to say than > it is to do > > richard > > > ______________________________**_________________ > > Talk-us mailing list > Talk-us@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.**org/listinfo/talk-us<http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us> > -- Martijn van Exel http://oegeo.wordpress.com/ http://openstreetmap.us/
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