[Osmf-talk] Alternative Strategic Plan

[Emerson Rocha]

Truth to be told, generic building=yes already add almost no information at
all to the map relevant for data users, so at least render then differently
(or not render at all) would disencourage low quality armchair mapping
(generic buildings for aerial imagery still useful if later there's plan to
survey the places with phone apps, but would become far less rewarding for
others). And yes, I'm somewhat surprised that not just the mappers, but
mapaton organizers, don't know that OSM is more than the renderized
version, but the metadata.

The 24 months validity would be better if focused on what already is tagged
differently, such as points of interest. Let me explain. For example, a
generic house with minimal address information likely will not change for a
very long time, maybe decades, however the shops can sometimes have even
faster changing than 24 months (open and close, etc). However, the beauty
of start to have better mapped addresses on generic buildings (not yet
discovered as some PoI) is that make far easier to upgrade later as a PoI,
because OSM itself can be used to know where the addr:housenumber is (and
this still be possible to do with armchair mapping and open licensed lists
of PoIs which have full address).

About the streets themselves, they already render the name or not, so this
already is a visual hint. I'm not sure if the roads are worth changing. For
example, even an unnamed road is still useful (because it can be routable)
and some roads really have no name. And, again, after a road has a name
(which may or not be wrong or over time changed) it would create too many
false positives and require recheck the name of the roads after a period of
time (even if far longer than 24 months). And the existence of surface tag
or not on the road, this already started to have changes months ago on the
default render.

About stronger hints about having open notes in a region, this change would
be a strong hint for them to be looked at faster than is today. Maybe not
something drastic, but could have a small unlabelled dot. A note already
would be a hint that might have some problem in that region, so even if
with lower priority to render (so very dense areas might not be able to
show notes) it could help who is using the map itself.

A bit more integration with hints (such as lack of routability), maybe
could be relevant as well. But here starts a problem on how to implement it
without being an extra layer (for example iD allows loading some of them
already on the QA options). The "2D nature" of maps might limit the
visuals, and even with vector tiles, the extra information would need to be
carefully checked, to not make the tiles heavy (I guess EWG had discussions
about some parts of the world having tiles with 1MB). I'm not saying to not
do it, but for example, the existing QA tools have a delay to process the
data, so more complex checks might be not trivial to render minutes after.

I have no opinion on the other topics (the ones related to money etc), but
in general, both the addresses information (at least addr:housenumber) and
the hint about PoIs being potentially need rechecked are relevant. Even the
data users (e.g. the corporate ones, which may not upload PoI information
they have) would likely have no opposition to give stronger hints to
devalue the visuals of generic buildings because after OSM data have
addresses, it becomes fantastic to conflate with other data!

> Brian M. Sperlongano said:
> Geo-located addresses in the United States are available in a US
government database. Canada has a national land cover database, as does
France.

Open geo-located addresses are a very rare case. Even without stronger
hints to push mappers do go out and map missing addr:housenumbers, services
based on OSM data likely already are more complete than government data
itself. Maybe the biggest opposition from me to the idea is (at least for
what is not PoI) 2 years to revalidate a house address is not necessary.
But the general idea of surveying old PoIs already even exists on some apps.

PS.: This email already is circulating between hardcore mappers, and would
easily affect old imports (the ones without any address Information, just
geometry, government) and less emphasis on data from people who heavily use
the AI assisted buildings. But even these people would find a reward to go
out and map missing information in buildings around, so I believe it is a
good thing. And it would easily push a MASSIVE revival on big cities
worldwide! Go for it! But again, we need to think of ways that are still
technically feasible, because even if we reach consensus, code would need
to be delivered.

Att.
Rocha
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