[Talk-GB] New mapper has imported all Nottingham street lights

[SomeoneElse]

On 29/07/2014 23:03, Dave F. wrote:
> ... Is the data valid? Is it an accurate import? Would he have flagged 
> it up if the user had added them manually one at a time? If the 
> answers are Yes/Yes/No, then is there a genuine problem?

I suspect the answers are currently "FSVO valid" (inasmuch it's what the 
council's contractors think they have), "out of date as soon as the 
button was pressed", and "no" - but more importantly it misses a couple 
of basic issues:

One is that, independently of any "import rules", it's surely just basic 
communication and politeness, if you're uploading 1776 pages of data to 
a shared database that refers to a remote town in another country, to 
actually talk to people locally first.  I can think immediately of a 
couple of other things that would come out of that discussion.  One is 
"are there any areas where streetlights have already been mapped" 
(answer yes, the gaslights in the Park certainly are).  We'd want to 
make sure that any import didn't duplicate existing data.  The second 
would be to consider what other data could be usefully captured at the 
same time - such as who owns or operates the lights and how much is it 
costing the locals.  It's a PFI scheme, so some sort of independent 
oversight, or interfacing with people looking to provide independent 
oversight, would surely make sense.

The second is that this is open data.  There's no immediate reason just 
to dump it into OSM just _because_ it's open data (especially if there 
are no plans for maintenance of it once it's in there - the source 
website says "Frequency of update - Continually").  It's not going to 
stop being available (in its "continually updated" form) from 
opendatanottingham.org.uk - why is it beneficial to have an out-of-date 
copy in OSM too?  The answer to that part might be "because OSM already 
stores some streetlights", but of course there needs to be a plan to 
keep the data up to date, and to understand what other data people 
making maps and using OSM data in Nottingham find important, and this 
just hasn't been done.

Cheers,

Andy


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