[Talk-GB] Postboxes & Payphones

[Ed Avis]

Perhaps I should give a little bit of background, explaining why I have started
reconciling Dracos and OSM data, hoping to import it.

I've been on many mapping trips around London, to start with mostly filling in
missing street names.  As the street names have become more complete I have
focused more on POIs such as shops, named buildings and of course post boxes. 
If I spot a post box I will usually cross the road to take down its ref number.

However, I've sometimes noticed after a mapping expedition that all the
postboxes I went hunting for are already known in the Dracos data, but nobody
had bothered to push them upstream to OSM.  This is quite dispiriting, and while
mapping is a fun thing to do, volunteers are still a scarce resource.  While I'm
happy to resurvey and refine existing data (as I sometimes do for Naptan bus
stops), nobody wants to feel they are wasting their time.

Now, if the data is of poor quality, bad enough to be worse than nothing (n.b.
there are certainly mistakes in the existing surveyed OSM boxes) then of course
it shouldn't be imported.  But I don't think there is any great divide between
armchair data importers and rugged, rosy-cheeked outdoor mappers.  Often the
motivation for using more automated tools or external data is to help the
surveying work.  For example it is certainly easier to walk round and check
existing bus stop nodes, which are at least
*approximately* in the right place, than to find them all from scratch.

Anyway, all this is moot until we have a bit more information on the quality of
this particular data source.  Let me make some reports on that (hopefully this
weekend) so we can decide which parts of the data, if any, are worthy of being
included in OSM.  And if you know perl, feel free to try out the code from
<http://github.com/epa/osm_postboxes> and see what it generates for your area. 
Any additional sanity checks or reconciliations that can be suggested are
welcome - I will certainly add some more myself.

--
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>