[Imports] How good can an import be?

[john whelan]

These are two points that seem to be overlooked too often.  My aim is to
create a useful map, ideally one that can fill niche requirements.
Reliability of the OSM map including correct names where the data has been
traced from Yahoo imagery is not good and to make it worse its difficult to
know if the road was entered by tracing or by hand held GPS before the
leaves came out.

I do get the impression though that for many OSM is not about creating a
useful map, let's leave that to Google, its about the community creating a
map and accepting different quality levels as part of the process.

Cheerio John


> You also have to consider quality.  A lot of the roads that show up on that
> animation as being added around the 2008/early 2009 timeframe were what you
> call 'zero star edits'[1].  People (often from a different continent) were
> using Yahoo imagery to trace in an outline of a road that would be unamed
> and often be a single way encompassing multiple real winding roads.  That
> practice like poorly done imports produces a map that 'looks complete' at
> low zoom levels but isn't all that great. Some of the mapping yourself and
> others did was great but the low zoom map at the time, like a TIGER only
> low-zoom map can be a bit deceiving.
>
>
>
>
>
> Often in these discussions about imports we talk about 'mappers' but we
> don't talk about the users of the map data.  Collecting map data is fun but
> most of us do it with the expectation that someone is going to actually use
> that data.  Back in 2008 when I loaded the OSM data around Toronto onto my
> smartphone it was pretty useless as a map to navigate with (if my plan for
> the day was to get from a to b, vs collect data).  Even last summer I had
> loaded OSM data onto my GPS for a trip to Quebec (no import at the time) and
> I had to resort to a paper gas-station map because the roads just weren't on
> the map (and many that were had no road names).
>
>
>
> And I think imports have limited that strength in North America.
>>
>
> Have other countries *outside* of Western Europe, especially with
> population densities comparable to North America that have had no imports
> been able to develop better communities than in North America?  Yes the
> English and Germans are awesome but other countries that have avoided
> imports might make for a more realistic comparison.
>
>
>
> [1] - http://weait.com/content/how-well-can-you-map
>
> Steve
>
>
>
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