[Imports] Importing fuel stations in UK and future similar imports

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 05/11/2017 05:39 PM, Ilya Zverev wrote:
> Together with the NavAds company, we plan to import a thousand Shell
> fuel stations to the United Kingdom. The source is official, which
> means, Shell company specifically shared the dataset to put them on
> maps. Do you have any objections or questions?

There are a couple other "we make your business visible on the map"
SEO-type businesses active in OSM, some better, some worse.

Typical problems include:

* Geocoding. We will want to know how the lat,lon pairs they use for
import have been generated. Sometimes the "official" source will
actually be based on measured GPS coordinates (good). Sometimes the
"official" source has simly geocoded their address with Google or HERE
(not admissible, license violation). Sometimes they have geocoded their
address with OpenStreetMap which is also bad because it can reinforce
errors or imprecisions - for example, if OSM has an address
interpolation range along a street, and a POI is placed with a specific
address at the computed interpolation point, then it looks like a
precise address but isn't.

* Ignoring the area around the imported information. We want imports to
match the existing data; automatic conflation is often not enough. A POI
can end up in a house, a lake, or in the middle of a road, and if that
is not just a one-off but a systematic problem (of the "let's dump our
stuff into OSM and the community can then fix it" kind) then it is
reason enough to revert the whole import and ask the importer to go back
to the drawing board.

* Mismatch between "official" data and reality. Especially for larger
chains it can easily happen that the company database doesn't reflect
reality on the ground, either through an error or because the reality on
the ground is somehow undesirable. For example, a hotel might be in the
chain's offical database with 49 rooms because local regulations tighten
for hotels of 50 rooms and up, but everyone knows in practice that the
hotel has 60 rooms and this is mapped in OSM. We wouldn't want
"official" data to overwrite what we have in OSM.

* Advertising. Some SEO companies go as far as putting advertising
messages in note tags, or invent new tags to describe the business in
the most colourful terms. While such advertising may occasionally be
factually correct ("family-owned since 1948"), we're usually not
interested in that.

These are *general* comments.

Looking at your proposed import specifically,

1. I'd be interested in the geocoding source as per the first bullet
point above. Of course this is only relevant to newly added POIs.

2. It seems to me that you're setting brand, operator, and occasionally
even name to "Shell". In Germany, the operator of a fuel station is
usually a small local business that has a franchise relationship with
the fuel company. Are you absolutely sure that Shell is actually the
operator of all these fuel stations? (It should be easily visible on a
receipt you get there.)

3. Also, in those cases where no name was set before and you put
"name=Shell", are you absolutely sure that it's not "name=Joe's Garage"
or something? Would such a situation be correctly recorded in your data?
I notice that e.g. the station in Dursley with the ID NVDS298-10019092
is a proposed import with "name=Shell", whereas Shell's own station
locator lists this as "Millwood Motor Company Limited".

4. I would also recommend not plastering the www.shell.co.uk URL all
over the place - if the *individual* fuel station doesn't have a web
site then it's not worth pointing to the Shell corporate site IMHO.

5. New stations look generally well placed compared to aerial imagery (I
only looked at a random sample) but the second bullet point above is an
issue; for example you have placed a new fuel station at the correct
location but in the middle of a school campus
http://www.openstreetmap.org/query?lat=53.56053&lon=-2.12306#map=19/53.56035/-2.12300
- a high quality import would have a human verify the sitation, detect
the issue, and reduce the school grounds accordingly (or maybe call the
chain and ask if this is some special kind of training fuel station...)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"