[Talk-ht] incorrect health facility imports

[Jaakko Helleranta.com]

Desole seulment en francoise. Svp utilise http://translate.google.com si tu comprends pas l'anglais.
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(This is a few days old by now as the reply didn't get sent before the other replies but these r my thoughts anyways.)

I see this being somewhat closely related to a wider problem about adding crisis response data / less-than-desirable-quality data into OSM during after acute crisis.

On one hand it's purely against OSM import rules.
One the other hand, Haiti was the first time such broad use of OSM happened in a such a big crisis. .. And in an area where the original map was practically non-existent.

The problem has different perspectives to it of which I can think of two top issues:

* it was more or less an emergency import (which doesn't mean that we can't clean it)
  - due to this there's a _ton_ of emergency health facilities (field hospitals, etc). These I tend to delete unless there's a reason to believe that there may be something there, of course.

* the health facility imports done were the "best" data that was available. You can find more or less the same data in the Government's Carte Sanitaire (Haiti Health Map, http://j.mp/cartesanitaire if I remember the shortlink right) (which is no excuse to dump crappy data to OSM...) 
This includes hospitals in the middle of the ocean, which I've usually dragged closer to the shore :) ...

Now what to do with these you ask?
Good question.

I personally haven't removed the amenity=hospital tags even though they _are_ polluting the map as you say. 
When trying to improve things by my self I've tried to move nodes closer to what I'm guessing may be the place where the health facility is -- if I have any clue.
The thing is that there may very well be _some_ heath facility in the area as I have found out by asking about the existence / locations of a number of facilities from health sector people I know. 
I've adjusted a number of health facility locations with locals / people with local knowledge and this has usually been very ad hoc "let's look at the map since you know the area and you can tell me if these facilities exist somewhere in the area so we can adjust the locations and information". If the amenity=hospital tag is removed this kind of fixing can not happen.
.. Also, deleting the "main tag" would simply hide the problem and significantly(?) increase the risk of someone entering a new node of the facility and nobody spotting the duplicate afterwards. 
So, rather than deleting the main tag I try to tag them with "FIXME=survey location/existence" or something alike.

I guess I adhere here to the though of: "Better roughly right than precisely wrong -- or not there at all" even though the health facilities (including some of the by-now-non-existing cholera treatment facilities, btw!) are polluting the map and are annoying...

As you can see, I have no clear solution/suggestion to the problem.

Thoughts, ideas, suggestions, anyone??

Cheers,
-Jaakko

P.S. This issue relates also to other quake response data added en-masse to OSM soon after the quake: I've recently nuked a ton of collapsed building nodes (a surprisingly large share of which were not collapsed to begin with, btw -- just normal Haitian unfinished constructions looking like "collapsed" for unexperienced remote mappers..). There's similar issue with "mudslides" (being in reality just typical soil erosion), etc.
P.P.S. HOT list has an partly related active topic on the issue of natural hazards in OSM.

Sent from my BlackBerry® device from Digicel
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Mobile: +509-37-26 91 54, Skype/GoogleTalk: jhelleranta

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Wolford <worldwidewolford at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 10:03:40 
To: Talk-HT at OSM<talk-ht at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: [Talk-ht] incorrect health facility imports

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