[HOT] Central African Republic import of WRI data

[Pierre Béland]

To my point of view, you should never import blankly. If its just a problem of accuracy, I agree that with a 200 meters error in a desertic area, it may still be helpful to import. But other then that, if we are not sure about the quality of the data, if the roads exist really, we should not import just to replace blank spots.

I have too often seen roads imported for Africa that correspond to nothing on the ground. I have tried to follow these roads in mountains and passed long time to evaluate thee. And since we dont have that many mappers, and that it's time consuming to evaluate the accuracy of such long roads crossing countries and correct / delete these, we often end up with these incorrect roads sitting in the database because the contributors do not want to pass that many time evaluating and correcting this. 

Therefore, it is important to take time to plan such imports, to take time to evaluate accuracy. It is sometime better to have nothing then anything.  This indicates that some work is still to be done. We dont map just to cover the map.  It take much less time to add new roads with good quality data then to try to evaluate and correct bad data imports.


 
Pierre 



>________________________________
> De : Ben Abelshausen <ben.abelshausen at gmail.com>
>À : Andrew Buck <andrew.r.buck at gmail.com> 
>Cc : Severin MENARD <severin.menard at gmail.com>; "hot at openstreetmap.org" <hot at openstreetmap.org> 
>Envoyé le : Mardi 2 juillet 2013 12h21
>Objet : Re: [HOT] Central African Republic import of WRI data
> 
>
>
>Andrew,
>
>Actually I agree, but I discussed this before with some other OSM/HOT people (It's been so long I don't remember when or who) and it was said that using inaccurate data might be worse than nothing.
>
>
>For the CAR specifically I think using the data might be better than not using it. There is nothing there, no data at all, for most of the country. There won't be a mapping community there in the near future... etc.
>
>
>
>Met vriendelijke groeten,
>Best regards,
>
>Ben Abelshausen
>ben.abelshausen at gmail.com
>http://twitter.com/xivk
>
>
>On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Andrew Buck <andrew.r.buck at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Regarding areas with no imagery.  I would still say to import the roads.  A couple hundred meters off is a lot, but it is better to have the 'connectivity' mapped (i.e. what town connects to what other town) than to have nothing at all.  Someone following the road in a car does not mind that their GPS tells them they are "beside" the road.  Also, it is my understanding that the data has some road names and such so I would import them to get that.  They can always be refined later when bing becomes available.  The imagery is being added fast, and just in the last year we have gone from only a few cities in Africa to much of the continent being covered.  I expect much of the rest to come online shortly.
>>
>>
>>Importing some of the data now and the rest later brings its own problems, so I would suggest putting it in.
>>
>>
>>-AndrewBuck
>>
>
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