[Talk-GB] Consolidated views of notes, fixmes, musical chairs, etc. (was: OpenStreetMap ten years on, and why it's time for a fresh slate)
David Woolley
forums at david-woolley.me.uk
Sat Nov 1 12:04:25 UTC 2014
On 27/10/14 21:52, Tim Saunders wrote:
> What would suit me is an Android app that allowed me to see what needs
> to be fixed in a particular area, so that I could check some things out
> if I had a spare half hour in the area…..so Notes, FixMes, Musical
> Chairs, OSM Inspector and other GB specific stuff (e.g. post boxes,
> cycle routes, land registry addresses as examples I recall being
> discussed in this group). Is there anywhere that these are all pulled
> together, even in a non-mobile friendly way? As OSM coverage improves,
> I would suggest that there is more opportunity to fix things not mapped
> correctly than map things not mapped at all (although in my experience
> one leads to another anyway) and seeing something that is wrong is often
> more of a spur to get involved than something that is missing altogether.
>
A danger with tools like this is that they encourage a certain sort of
armchair mapping where people blindly fix things based on map notes
without verifying them.
A very recent, topical, case is that Matthijs has added map notes for a
lot of premises that he assumes are shops of a particular brand
suggesting that they may need tagging in a particular way. This has
completely negated the purpose of using the map notes, which was to
avoid making changes to the actual map based on unverified assumptions.
In significant parts of the country it is now as though Matthijs had
actually made those changes.
One, random, example, from one of the main armchair mappers involved is
<https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1693488257>. This is a change of
shop type but they have also added shop=* when there was none there before.
In these cases a real survey may actually find that the shop has gone or
been re-branded, as well as the possibility it isn't the well known
brand, isn't a shop, or is an unusual shop for the brand.
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