[Imports] Bing Building Import

[Christoph Hormann]

Greg,

please indicate when you are citing what others (here Microsoft) have 
written, this makes it much easier to see where there is actually new 
information, in particular here where you know that most have read what 
Microsoft has written on their data.

I will comment on a few of the new things you have written but like to 
emphasize this is still not an import review because a lot of 
information required for that is missing.  You could however read up 
old discussions on previous building imports here to get an idea on the 
requirements and suggestions made for those.

> [...]  In my early opinion, the foot prints are no
> better nor no worse than a craft mapper,s drawing.

This is always a pretty meaningless comparison because it is apples and 
peaches.  When i talk about "quality aspects" i mean quantifiable 
measures of quality.

> [...]  As your
> other post provided an idea of starting with Montana, that will not
> be useful in my case. 

I suggested rural Montana might be a good place to start if you 
intend "to poke the data for quality issues".  Since that is not what 
you want to do my suggestion is pretty useless for you obviously.

> > Microsoft's process documentation contains a number of hints that
> > indicate things can go wrong in the process in ways that are likely
> > to produce significant errors of kinds that are very unlikely to
> > happen in manual mapping.  Without having reliable data on how
> > often these things do happen (and how this varies between different
> > geographic settings) you would essentially be doing a blind import.
>
> Depending on the craft mapper, hand drawn buildings can have the same
> problems. [...]

As i have been very clear about this is not the case:

> > Microsoft's process documentation contains a number of hints that
> > indicate things can go wrong in the process in ways that are likely
> > to produce significant errors of kinds that are very unlikely to
> > happen in manual mapping.

The only thing that could convince me to change this assessment would 
be - as already mentioned - a thorough analysis of the quality that 
holds up to scientific scrutiny.  And it is frankly much more likely 
that such analysis would confirm my impression.  If it does not that 
would mean Microsoft has made progress in the field that absolutely 
dwarfs everyone else working in the area and if that was the case we 
would see it on the stock market. ;-)

Don't make the mistake of assuming this to be a building data set like 
various ones produced by local authorities or mapping institutions some 
of which have been considered for import or have been imported in the 
past.  It is not.  Therefore again my statement: IMO this means that a 
proper import review would only be possible based on a thorough 
analysis of the quality of Microsoft's product that holds up to 
scientific scrutiny.

I would also strongly suggest everyone who wants to work with the data 
Microsoft released now to familiarize themselves with the technological 
background behind this.  Given that we will certainly see much more of 
this being pushed into everyday life in various fields that is highly 
useful knowledge anyway even beyond OSM.  I have written a short essay 
on the matter some time ago that could serve as a starting point:

http://blog.imagico.de/on-imitated-problem-solving/

though this is without links to further information, you would have to 
research that yourself.

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