[Talk-GB] RFC: Semi Automatic Import of schools

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On 9 June 2016 at 10:50, Christian Ledermann
<christian.ledermann at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to propose to use http://schools.mapthe.uk for a semi automatic import
> of Ordonance Survey Open School grounds data combined with
> edubase and seed data into OpenStreetMap.
>
> The Tool is available at http://schools.mapthe.uk/
> The sourcecode and documentation is available at
> https://github.com/cleder/os-opendata-edubase
>
> My tests with this tool are very encouraging, I'd like to go forward
> to the imports mailing list with this proposal.

I have a quick look at your tool, but I'm afraid the instances I was
presented with initially left me rather confused about exactly what it
is doing and where the data is coming from. (I didn't read the github
readme to start with, as that looked from the start to be instructions
for installing the app yourself, rather than how to use it.) I think
that basic info should be provided on the page itself so users don't
have to go elsewhere to find  out what is what. It would also be good
to have a better description of how things are selected / matched up
between the datasets. In particular, is the tool trying to go through
all school polygons in OS Open Map, or just those matched to an
Edubase entry that doesn't have an existing ref:edubase match in OSM?
Are you just matching / showing things based on proximity to the
current OS Open Map polygon?

The first few things I was shown were as follows:

* http://schools.mapthe.uk/assign/22701/ -- The blue polygon seems to
be for a churchyard, not a school. Why/how was is chosen / matched? Is
it an error in OS Open Map perhaps?

* http://schools.mapthe.uk/assign/22591/ -- There's a school name but
no other data shown. Is this because there are no nearby edubase
entries? (It would be helpful if the page says so.) This might not
mean the site is not/no longer a school though, as it could be a
satellite site for a school with a main address elsewhere.

* http://schools.mapthe.uk/assign/5733/ -- The red area is an existing
OSM polygon, but this isn't made clear on the page. Also could the
full set of tags be shown in the section at the bottom, ideally as a
table?

A few other comments / suggestions:

* It would also be helpful if you could explicitly list the source
data items their key data explicitly on your page view (as you already
partially do with the OSM data) and also provide clickable links to
the OSM object (e.g. http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/148997325) and
full Edubase entry (e.g.
http://www.education.gov.uk/edubase/establishment/summary.xhtml?urn=111777)
to allow people to inspect them.

* In the case where you think an OSM object already exists, could
there be a button to add/replace the existing tags with the data you
think is appropriate (ideally with an option to overwrite or preserve
each existing tag that clashes)? Any maybe an option to completely
replace/update the geometry too -- though this is a bit dangerous, as
you'd have to be careful with what to do with the original nodes in
case they were also being used for other things.

* I don't think "os-open" is a suitable source tag if it's supposed to
be referring to OS Open Map Local. Using something approximating the
full name would be better as it is less ambiguous. "os-open" could be
mistaken for a general tag referring to any of the OS OpenData
products.

* The tags to be added would be easier to read if they were presented
as separate rows in a table.

* Could the map layer switcher be shown open all the time? Before
adding a polygon, one should really check the Satellite view, so this
would save a click each time.

* The height of the map view is annoying small on my large monitor.

* Are you looking for OSM nodes and relations as well as ways? (e.g.
at http://schools.mapthe.uk/assign/26893/ there's an existing node
that doesn't seem to be detected.)

* When there's no OSM data, the forwards and backwards links look like
they're in a box with a title "Openstreetmap Data", when they're
actually nothing to do with any OSM data. If there's no OSM data to
display, then you should either have some placeholder text to say so,
or omit the heading.

* The telephone numbers (phone=*) aren't in the international format
specified at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:phone .

Finally, from the few polygons I've looked at, they're not always that
accurate. In more than 50% of cases, I think I would want to do better
drawing it manually over the satellite imagery. I'm not convinced that
providing a tool that encourages / makes it easy for people to add
lower quality data is necessarily a good thing. Perhaps we need to
assess the accuracy of these polygons more carefully before
proceeding.

I hope some of this is useful...

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker
http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/