[Talk-GB] An open letter to OSM-GB

[Andrew]

I went to the OSM-GB (http://osmgb.org.uk) presentation at Geomob and first of 
all I’d like to say that I’m interested in the initiative and wish it well.

A first place to look for database checks would be the checks that the 
existing quality assurance tools 
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance) make, though it may be 
better not to duplicate checks that other programs do well.

A potentially fruitful line of checking may be UK-specific checks, not to make 
life more difficult for international applications by doing our “own thing” 
but to make sure, for example, that road numbers and postcodes are in the 
British format.

An advanced challenge that risks large numbers of false positives would be a 
spelling checker for names (perhaps shop chains).

Any data checks really need to be able to have both false positives and real 
issues that are fixed cleared from the reports quickly and, as a psychological 
point, also not encourage new or excessively gung ho editors to 
blindly “correct” false positives.

I’m looking forward to seeing some resulrs.

--
Andrew