[Imports] Importing Kerala, India road network from Facebook's ML generated data

[Christoph Hormann]

On Wednesday 29 August 2018, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> Actually, this does not only apply to imports but also to concerted
> mapping efforts - quote from a post that Pierre Beland made on
> osm-talk just yesterday: "The number of contributors is limited in
> Africa and the risk is that errors created by mapathons while
> participating to Crisis responses stay as is for years."

Yes, this is important to be clear about - what Facebook & Co. produce 
with algorithms is not necessarily objectively worse than what mappers 
produce - you can find many cases where manual mapping has added the 
most ridiculous geometries and tags.  You could say that manual mapping 
can be both worse than what the worst bot mapper produces and better 
than even the most sophisticated algorithms (and i am confident to 
include in that the forseeable future).

What we really need is to get the directed editing policy finalized.  
because the problem with using algorithms in mapping is not the 
algorithms per se, it is the way the algorithms and their results are 
used, how this is organized and the lack of meaningful mandatory 
quality control to a non-negotiable minimum standard when this is done 
in an organized fashion.

Having a clear framework for organized mapping activities also helps the 
organizations involved in such.  Right now it is clearly visible that 
there is a lot of confusion how to document and communicate organized 
activities - some just don't care while others try to work responsibly 
but in the absence of a clear framework of rules and requirements this 
is very hard.

But i also would like to keep the import review process free of the 
political discussion.  Although some people seem to have the impression 
this is meant to discourage imports and make them more difficult it is 
in fact more a service provided by the OSM community to those who want 
to import data to improve the quality of their work.  You are required 
to follow these rules but in return you receive free advise.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/