[Talk-GB] Post-processing shop values (was mechanical edit)

[Matthijs Melissen]

On 3 November 2014 12:19, SK53 <sk53.osm at gmail.com> wrote:
> Broadly I'm not in favour of the various mechanical edits suggested.
> Bringing together bookmaker tags is harmless, but does little to gather in
> the long tail. More extensive edits both deny the undoubted value of
> revisiting an area (either in life or from an armchair), and are
> unnecessary.

Thank you for your input to the discussion.

I don't think post-processing is the right way to go. Of course,
everything that can be done with mechanical edits can be done with
post-processing, but in my opinion, it is bad practice to not worry
about data quality in the source data, with the argument that it can
be corrected in post-processing just as well. This would mean that
every single data consumer would need to write post-processing code
(and keep it up to date), which will simply not happen. Correcting the
data at a single point, the source, is much more efficient than
correcting it at all points of consumption.

In fact, post processing would likely make data consistency even
worse, because mappers won't notice that they are entering incorrect
or non-standard data (and for this reason, such post-processing rules
would likely not be included in the standard rendering style).

Of course regular surveys are important, but surveying is not mutually
exclusive with correcting the data mechanically where we can.

-- Matthijs