[talk-au] Adelaide out of copyright street directory

[Darrin Smith]

On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:39:54 +1030
Cameron <osm-mailing-lists at justcameron.com> wrote:

> Nick,
> 
> The problem you describe can be caused without the use of yahoo
> imagery or out of copyright maps. If someone surveyed a street in
> 2006 and it has since been made oneway, it will not be updated unless
> someone is keeping a close eye on changes made by local councils. If
> a country road is bitumenised, or a road is blocked for traffic
> management, or speed humps are installed, etc. etc.

Yeah I've been pondering this as I've been slowly working on the areas
on the northern urban fringe where development is happening in dribs
and drabs all over the place and realising I'm not likely to drive down
some of the roads unless I'm deliberately re-reviewing them.

I've realised that it's not a problem that's unique to OSM even, every
map I've ever purchased that I know the area well enough has suffered
from being out of date at time of publish anyway. 

I think OSM has the potential (with enough manpower) to be ahead of the
game anyway. Even if people who don't actually map start using
things like open street bugs to flag issues for people who do.

At the moment the people reviewing the data are the people who
regularly map and until we have a 'normal' set of data covering a
whole metro area we won't get the many eyes and ears we need to catch
all the little changes happening all the time. I have had about 6
people say they won't use it in Adelaide because there's just not
enough coverage to make it replace a street directory, so the sooner we
get 100% street coverage the sooner these kind of people will be on
board and reporting the minor things we all miss.

Nick, My worry with the Old map + yahoo combo is that some armchair
mappers may over-ride existing surveyed data (I've already seen surveyed
stuff over-ridden by someone looking at yahoo a few times) maybe even
as far as changing the name to the old map name. :/ 
But I think the overall gains that will be made in getting the map to a
basic usable state so the 'masses' can operate with it, and provide the
detail feed back is more important. Until we have that we're just
making a toy for ourselves and we can strive to make it perfect but
it'll be useless to everyone else.

-- 

=b