[Imports] Import of addresses in Poland

[Jaak Laineste (Nutiteq)]

Here are some specific points I need to challenge


>  If the main idea is to have OSM data reflect reality - a lack of imports (of course, well- made ​​) deviates from this idea.

No, this is not the main idea of OSM. More important than to reflect reality is to have living every day up-to-date map, created by community. Too much detailed data from imports works unfortunately against this. You will have data what the community cannot keep up-to-date, this will be more and more outdated, and after few years the data is so bad that noone can use it and it is not possible to update it.

It is better to have less, but community-maintainable data.

> For example, the town of 50,000 inhabitants - making the address points one by one would take years for sure and maybe more . If the process can be accelerated by increasing the value of the database , what for waiting?

You may see quality increase in day one, but after couple of years you'll notice that the data is outdated, and your active importers are not able to keep up with real life changes. You need community in each town what you import.

>  I support imports , which makes Zbigniew - they are made ​​ for the good of our community.

It is good for map, but it is not always clear that it is good also for community in the long term. Bad thing is that you will only notice impact to the community after few months time. You will see if there will be more editors or not. It may also be true that better map bring many new community members, who considered OSM too raw beforehand. Has anyone done any study for this? If not, I can try to do some studies based on my country, which has both full city imports and nation-wide thematic imports, and recent address data import. Many of them done (sometimes foolishly) by myself.

> Personally I use now only navigation based on OSM data (as OsmAnd) No address data often means that I need to use commercial navigation. But are you sure of what we want? Is it a good way? If I spend my time (for free, no money) to create maps I want to use navigationfor free.

If this is your main problem, then you are handling it in wrong way. The root problem of OsmAnd (I know they are not alone in this) is optimistic assumption that OSM is already good enough for universal address search. It is not. And it will take some more years to get it good enough. Right way to fix it is to get community to every town. So far they could and should create separate address database from various free sources, including not only OSM community data, but also municipal open data from Polish and other authorities. Geonames.org could be good candidate. Yes, it is a lot of work, but actually less than using OSM as repo for database merges; this is for sure what OSM is not about.


Jaak