[Tagging] Different approaches by other projects
Peter Elderson
pelderson at gmail.com
Thu Nov 18 10:24:32 UTC 2021
OSM is a miracle of flaws and chaos producing a widely appreciated and
valuable outcome.
Verifiability is at the heart of this. It steers the chaos to a mainstream
of mapping, documenting, validating, and control efforts.
Verifiability drives a bandwidth of quality control, but not quality
assurance. QA needs hard criteria, authoritative norms, prescription. The
OSM project cannot and will not provide those.
I am not saying the efforts shouldn't be made, but we cannot but accept the
limits of what we do. The fact that OSM in many respects outperforms
government databases, makes this easier, though I often have to remind
myself of that.
This also means that OSM cannot be 100% relied upon for, e.g., emergencies
where lives are at stake. There you need a QA-level not provided by OSM.
But all is not lost!
Luckily, if the stakeholders for such use cases are experienced mappers, or
work with the mapper community, they can provide the QA they need, for that
particular subset of OSM data.
I am thinking of a project we now have in Nederland for the "Safety
Regions". They use a routing and navigating application based on the OSM
database, and they will do the mapping according to the specifications set
by the Dutch mapping community. Prescriptive, yes. Lives are at stake, so
we have a responsability there. However, a few common variants will be
included in the specs, so the application will have to support those, and
all will be within the mainstream of OSM usage and documentation.
Prescriptive for the Dutch, but for the wider OSM community, these specs
are descriptive: this is how the Dutch do it.
Peter Elderson
Op do 18 nov. 2021 om 10:20 schreef Minh Nguyen <
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us>:
> Vào lúc 20:20 2021-11-17, Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging đã viết:
> > Nov 17, 2021, 22:08 by tomasstraupis at gmail.com:
> >
> > And at the same time we have:
> > * governments opening their data at a very fast pace, and their data
> > is homogenous - stable and very usable (curated by professionals with
> > a clear knowledge on how and where the data is used)
> >
> >
> > Maybe it is true for some specific datasets or specific countries.
> >
> > If you work with government data and ended with this impression
> > you either are lucky or have unusually competent government
> > in this area.
>
> Tomas's enthusiasm for open government datasets is admirable, but
> comparing OSM to them is comparing apples and oranges. OSM has a
> different, complementary role to play.
>
> Those of us based in the U.S. are quite familiar with public domain
> government datasets. They have their pluses and minuses. Homogeneity and
> comprehensiveness is a huge plus, but the data comes with the caveat of
> being fragmented into a hundred thousand gratuitously incompatible
> datasets. On the other hand, the national datasets that aggregate local
> datasets are notorious for their unevenness: names like TIGER, GNIS, and
> NHD will elicit groans from many on this list. Nonetheless they remain
> an important resource for us.
>
> The public sector maintains robust data on certain topics but nowhere
> near the full breadth of topics that OSM ideally accommodates. In fact,
> the U.S. Geological Survey recently gutted the federal government's
> canonical database of POIs, removing every airport, church, hospital,
> park, etc. -- everything but the names of populated places. The removed
> POI types hadn't been actively maintained since 2014 due to a lack of
> funding. [1] I think we can legitimately claim to be the ones who've
> been maintaining this GNIS data instead. [2]
>
> Vào lúc 13:08 2021-11-17, Tomas Straupis đã viết:
> > So make no mistake. Community is important, but if that means
> > allowing anybody to destroy the quality of the data with no control -
> > it will not last long. There are other emerging means of collecting at
> > least general/georeferencing/base data (road/water network, landcover,
> > buildings, places etc.) which are way more consistent, verifiable,
> > stable and homogenic - therefore much more usable - than OSM.
>
> By all accounts, OSM tagging is chaotic, but a lot of that comes from
> being open-minded about what's worth mapping. We don't have the luxury
> of getting all the answers fed to us by an authority. To the extent that
> the alternative methods you mention find success, they could become
> tantalizing opportunities for imports into OSM.
>
> Sure, some of the chaos is our doing, in having multiple toothless
> quasi-authorities between the wiki, wiki proposals, editor presets, peer
> pressure in chat, and sheer elbow grease in the database. But at least
> we can align some of these power centers through good-faith discussions,
> bold wiki cleanups, and well-planned retagging efforts. By contrast, a
> focus on control against impending destruction is just so distant from
> my own experience as a mapper, documentarian, and data consumer that I
> don't see how it would result in any meaningful improvements.
>
> [1]
>
> https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/ngp/board-on-geographic-names/domestic-names
> [2] The USGS also has a well-designed, crowdsourced National Map Corps
> program that's intended to fill in gaps in GNIS, but the 14 feature
> types it collects pale in comparison to OSM's scope and ambition:
> https://navigator.er.usgs.gov/help/WebHelp/structure_def_table.pdf
>
> --
> minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us
>
>
>
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