Peter, The point isn't whether or not your tool will create correct route relations but what the point of doing that would be. I can understand creating route relations for long distance cycling/hiking paths that people actually want to navigate and historic routes (Route 66 comes to mind as a non-American) but what is the point of creating a route relation for every highway?
No-one gets up in the morning and decides to navigate "State Highway 483" from one end to the other and even if they did a decent routing engine could create the route on the fly, so adding it to OSM is a waste of time and would just add pointless complexity to the data-set. Kevin On 21 February 2011 16:58, Peter Budny <pet...@gatech.edu> wrote: > Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> writes: > > > Hi, > > > > On 02/21/2011 04:03 PM, Peter Budny wrote: > >> Those of you who think all automated or semi-automated data > >> contributions are harmful to OSM are dooming this project to never be > >> able to grow to become a leading source of mapping data. > > > > It is a common fallacy to believe that good map data could somehow, > > magically, be produced from computers that evaluate GPS tracks, camera > > recordings, or aerial imagery. > > > > If this were possible, then Google et al. would be 10 times as good at > > doing it as we are. > > Google, like Waze, has both historic and real-time traffic data > automatically generated by millions people with mobile phones. So in at > least some ways, they ARE 10 times better than OSM. > > > The strength of OSM is the people on the ground. If you try to > > eliminate them from the equation > > Whoa, who said anything about eliminating people? What I'm saying is > that we should find ways to integrate human editors with automated or > semi-automated tools, so that humans can delegate the tedious work to > computers and spend more time doing things that can't be handled by > computers. > > >> Last year, as part of a school project, I built a robot that will > >> automatically create route relations for all the state highways in the > >> US, being careful not to change or duplicate existing data. > > > > [...] > > > >> The code would be in use already if not for a few people running around > >> panicking about my devil-robot and its witchcraft. > > > > Maybe you haven't been able to demonstrate the added value your > > mechanical edit would bring to the database? > > The value is that > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kentucky#State_routes would show > route relations for all 6000+ state routes in Kentucky, instead of > 7... and then I could use the same code to finish the other 49 states in > the US. And then with minor modifications, I could use the same code in > other countries. > > As an analogy, we store OSM's source code in Subversion and Git, and let > those tools compare files when we make a change. Could this be done by > hand? Of course. But why would you want to? You would produce the > same result (actually, you're more likely to make a mistake than the > computer). Yes, sometimes the tools come upon situations they can't > handle, and have to let a human intervene, but they relieve us of the > tedious bits. > > Some people look at OSM and say, "It needs more tools." Some people > say, "It needs less tools." Consider me firmly in the first camp. > > > I mean, if it can be > > determined by a robot, then surely it would be redundant to have it in > > the data again? > > First, your reasoning is specious. Consider a shopping receipt: what's > the "added value" to listing a subtotal and total, when these could be > trivially computed by summing the items purchased and subtracting the > amount paid? > > Second, the robot's contributions would not be perfect... but then > again, neither are mine. I've never drive down Kentucky State Highway > 483, so any edits I make to it are merely the best I can do given what's > already in OSM. But if I see tiger:name_base="State Highway 483", I'm > going to put it in a relation with the other ways that match it. A > robot can do exactly the same thing, only a lot more efficiently than I > can. > > And before you counter... no, I don't think it's pointless or wrong to > edit a part of the map I've never been to. If I (or anyone else) ever > DOES go there, it would be nice to have already improved the map as much > as possible, rather than letting it remain a completely unedited jumble > or void. > -- > Peter Budny \ > Georgia Tech \ > CS MS student \ > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > talk@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk >
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