[OHM] OHM for Knight News Challenge?

[Lester Caine]

On 14/09/15 01:37, Richard Welty wrote:
>> The Knight News Challenge this year is "How might we make data work
>> > for individuals and communities?"
>> >
>> > Proposals remain the same:
>> >
>> > The key feature I think we need is ways to better represent the data
>> > - dynamic maps of any desired time range. Server side and client side
>> > should be looked at.
>> >
> i think a key thing is a coherent plan for representing complex time
> data. it
> needs to be reasonable to enter, but also reasonable for data consumers to
> use, and it needs to represent some sometimes quite complex situations as
> well as some very ambiguous situations (where precise times are not known.)
> 
> during the SOTM US hack day, i know that there was a pretty good
> conversation
> on the other side of the table about representation of time, but i was
> too deep
> in getting minutely updates of overpass going to pay anywhere near enough
> attention.

Having just spent far too much time on something else over the weekend I
can appreciate the problem of keeping up with everything ...

My own can of worms relates to the 'time' element of OSM data and why
separate development of a mechanism to fix that is irritating. My can of
worms has had several posts in both OSM lists and on wikipedia but the
crux of the problem is that different people have different views of
even the same data.

To document a short example, one of the next villages over from here is
'Weston Subedge' or at least that is the name identified in the OS data,
on the Royal Mail PAF file it's 'Weston-Subedge' while on the current
road signs it's a combination of 'Weston Subedge', 'Weston Sub-Edge' and
'Weston-Sub-Edge'. The latter seems to be what was 'adopted' by the
local railway when it was built with old pictures showing
'Weston-Sub-Edge' on the platform and timetables, while the OS maps
continued to show 'Weston Subedge Station'. I am waiting on an answer to
a couple of emails to official bodies as to their take on things, but
even simply adding the data a name change arose would seem to be a
pointless exercise when everybody is using a different name.

ORIGINALLY I was looking to add start_date and end_date to the OSM data
to map these changes over time, and we have accurate dates for such
events as the opening and closure of the station and can identify the
source of it's different names but just how do you handle even the
current differences in the name?

It's not the only example of name confusion just down the 30 odd miles
of 'track' and of cause we have the argument on OSM on mapping
'abandoned' railway lines and pushing the old data to OHM. The
Honeybourne line is a perfect example of such a line which physically
exists today even if there are no tracks on some sections. The track is
fast approaching Broadway and it would have been nice to document it's
progress as each section was restored and 'appeared' again on the OSM
data, but we just have the whole route of cleared track bed, and while
the remaining section from Broadway to Honeybourne is shown as a track,
it is owned by Sustrans with the intention of restoring the track in
conjunction with a cycleway. The data is OSM has been 'adjusted' so that
the information remains on the current map.

We should be documenting current history today, but instead a lot of
that material is being lost or buried in a way it can't easily be used.
I feel that I have a fairly self contained section of data that could be
used as an example of best practice when working with both current,
historic and forthcoming data, but don't know what to do with it :(

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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