[Talk-GB] Importing Website Data

Tom Hughes tom at compton.nu
Tue Dec 19 15:20:57 UTC 2017


On 19/12/17 14:46, Brian Prangle wrote:

> For those who decry the approach of using third party data, preferring 
> instead the personally surveyed approach, I echo Ilya's and Warin's 
> sentiments: Lloyds TSB demerged in 2013 and we still have 200 instances 
> of Lloyds TSB, TA Centres became Army Reserve Centres at about the same 
> time  and we  still have about 40 instances of TA Centre, Shell 
> purchased Total filling stations in 2012, and during the recent 
> validation exercise on Shell data, name=Total was the commonest error. 
> What about the the wholesale closure and transfer  of Post Offices or 
> the planned closure of thousands of BT phone boxes?  We don't have the 
> number of motivated mappers to do this,  and expecting evrything to be 
> ground surveyed might be a reason why we have such a high attrition 
> rate; so we should emulate the rest of society and use automated IT 
> methods to assist us and make our lives easier where appropriate. OSM is 
> a balance between IT  imported data/automated edits and human ground 
> surveys.

Which is exactly what everybody said about OSM when it started - that it 
couldn't possibly work and there'd never be enough people.

Pretty sure we proved them wrong.

The fundamental problem of imports that conflate with existing data is 
that you have way of knowing whether or not you are actually improving 
anything - you are making an assumption that an "official" source will 
be up to date and accurate but in the real world they are often anything 
but.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/



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