[Osmf-talk] [OSM-talk] "The Future of Free and Open-Source Maps" Slashdot.org , Saturday February 17, 2018

[Seán Lynch]

Hi Michael,

I appreciate the decentralised nature of OSM/F.

Would it be worth considering-
1. A set of tutorials / guiding principles that OSMF could agree on that
incoming mappers could use to identify gaps, improve the quality of their
inputs, other inputs and meet a criteria or some goals/targets? Is there a
part of OSM where we can go to see that "this needs to be done"? Can this
be made into an infographic that would be popular to share on social media
and easy to consume? Or would effort be better spent on advanced training
to encourage the development of smaller numbers of higher quality mappers?
In my experience I find that some critical parts of OSM are not formatted
favourably. For example many addresses that share a language are often
separated with the character "/" which when using the string as a URL is
problematic eg- the nominatim address I got for Switzerland was
"Schweiz/Suisse/Svizzera/Svizra" and instead of using "-", I have to search
every string for "/" and replace it with "-". Not a big deal, but some
standardization on formatting would be nice. I love the way OSM uses native
languages and alphabets, but I think it would be useful for OSM to include
a English language version and a native version of each country name. I say
this as an Irish speaker. Some more examples of where things are out of
date or there is different inputs used, eg "Galway" vs "County Galway" or
"Galway City" "Caithair na Gaillimhe" in the field with a key of "City" or
"County". In comparison with US datasets, the same type of regional
districts are called "States". When working with nominatim on a global
scale, this becomes really problematic. At OpenLitterMap, I am building a
list of locations dynamically based in inputs from new territory (which is
redeemable in 100, 50, 25 Littercoin). I also manually verify and inspect
each piece of data diligently (to the best of my ability) before releasing
it as verified data. Each data has multiple stages of verification.

2. A MOOC or a refresher course on how to identify gaps and make
contributions to OSM. Are we in contact with Geography departments where
gaps exist? Can we provide them with a set of guiding principles / an
assignment / that is available to include as part of a course assignment or
as extra curricular career-building activity? Maybe reward students with a
badge or something to post in LinkedIn to show they have completed X task
of contributing to OSM?

Just thinking out loud-

Cheers,
Seán
-- 
https://openlittermap.com @OpenLitterMap (Fb, Tw, Ig)
M.Sc. Coastal & Marine Environments (NUIG, 2015)
M.Sc. GIS & Remote Sensing (UCC, 2014)
B.A. Geography & Economics (UCC, 2011)
ie.linkedin.com/in/seanlynchgis
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/attachments/20180220/2de2434b/attachment.html>