On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 8:16 PM, David Earl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think it is terribly hard to know whether you have all the footpaths, > and I think we'd hardly ever mark anywhere "complete" if we did that. I think it's terribly hard to know when a map is correct and complete, regardless of what you're considering. In fact, as something I've floated with some people before, I think the idea of "completeness" is the wrong way round. I think we should be considering where a map is *incomplete*. Think about it. If you are presented with a map of your village and asked whether it's right, it's very unlikely that you know all the roads and all the names and how everything connects and be sure of yourself. But it's quite likely that what you'll spot (if anything) is a mistake or a missing road. I can do this with TIGER stuff for example - I can't tell you if the map is correct, but I can definitely find bits that are definitely wrong. I've been considering what I'd do to Wandsworth and Fulham (my local areas) if someone asked me to mark which areas are correct. I think there's very little value in me doing so, since most roads I've only been down once and hardly likely to check the name from memory. But there's a couple of bits that are definitely wrong, and I can point them out easily. It's just another way of thinking about it, but I think that neutral/wrong is probably more useful than neutral/complete when considering maps. And it certainly cuts out trying to define 'complete', since whichever reason something is wrong (name, connectivity, missingness) it's very easy to state why it's wrong. And rather than more and more being complete (for this, that and the other definition of complete) there'll be fewer and fewer bits that are wrong. Nobody ever looks at a map and remarked how many bits were correct. Nor does any software product keep a list of lines of code that are working. Or it's an 'exception driven' way of considering things. Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk