[Talk-GB] Importing Shell fuel stations

Andy Allan gravitystorm at gmail.com
Sun Nov 5 16:45:29 UTC 2017


On 3 November 2017 at 17:51, Ilya Zverev <ilya at zverev.info> wrote:
> First, thanks everyone for checking the import. I've made some improvements regarding addresses, and I removed the "operator" tag. You can see the improvements on the same map. I'd like to join Richard in a search for a review tool, which would allow people from UK to participate.

Maproulette springs to mind.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MapRoulette for those who haven't
seen it before.

On a more general point, I recently attended SOTM-US and it was
noticeable the shift in approach to third-party data that has been
happening over there in the last few years. Very few people or
companies were discussing imports in the manner of "lets get the data
into the right format and then just upload it with a script" and
instead the theme is very much how to get data into the hands of
mappers and how to develop the right tools so that the local
communities can incorporate the data themselves. Facebook were very
clear on this. Even ESRI have been working on developing iD so that
mappers can use third-party data during their normal workflow, rather
than going down the shapefile-and-a-script route. So it's a little
disappointing to return home and find that someone is trying to upload
some dataset directly to the servers, instead of trying put the data
in the hands of mappers to deal with it ourselves.

This Shell data appears to be useful, but I don't like the idea of
giving everyone only a few days to review and comment before shoving
it into the database. Please explore options, like MapRoulette or
others, so that the mappers are in control of the process and not the
techies. I'm sure if mappers are working through the list as part of a
MapRoulette challenge, checking for weirdness and ticking off the ones
that are done, we'll all enjoy it more and we'll end up with better
results. Even just improving these tags as part of a challenge will
lead mappers to reposition the fuel station nodes more accurately, or
even add some further details from imagery, or whatnot.

In short: Third-party data good, bulk imports bad. Power to the mappers!

Thanks,
Andy



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