[Talk-us] parcel data in OSM

[Jeff Meyer]

Why does "imports" mean "not crowdsourced," if the crowd determines which
imports are source-able?

Why doesn't public-domain data that the crowd has funded count as
crowdsourced?

No one has been able to provide directly observable & verifiable
information about Ptolemy, yet there is still a Wikipedia page about him.

My concern about this entire discussion is that the whole import vs
community argument is employed even when there is a community behind an
import.


On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 3:21 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> On 31.12.2012 06:49, Steve Coast wrote:
>
>> Therefore I don't see why each
>> country or state (i.e. Mass. and their own imports) can't have it's
>> own solution which reflects the cultural realities there.
>>
>
> Your argument seems to be, essentially, that the cultural reality "there"
> is that they have no need for a crowdsourced map. If that is so, then maybe
> we should just accept that, and move on to places where there is such a
> need?
>
> When you say that "Waze has not failed", I wouldn't know - Waze has zero
> publicity where I live, and their website offers a choice of "United States
> - Italy - Spain - Israel - Rest of world". It may be a big thing in the
> States but over here it usually doesn't even get a mention when people are
> talking about map data.
>
> You're also talking of "ten or twenty" crowd-sourced maps of the world,
> and making it sound like a threat to OSM.
>
> The real threat to OSM is to rely on imported data. If 99.9% of data in
> the US comes from imported sources, then those "ten or twenty" other
> crowd-sourced maps can simply import the same, and boast: "Our map has only
> 0.1% less than OpenStreetMap, and we're growing!"
>
> You say that most users don't care where their data comes from, they just
> use whatever is in the package. Which also means that user adoption of OSM
> is worth little; if there's OSM on the iPhone today, there might be OtherSM
> (which offers 99.9% of the data that OSM has plus more favourable licensing
> terms) on the iPhone tomorrow and there goes your user base.
>
> Any advantage we want to have over the competition that you paint on the
> wall can only come through a large community that cares for our data, a
> community committed to OSM, doing work that cannot be easily replaced by 50
> programmers from some outsourcing company.
>
> In one sentence of your long post you mention the hope that imports could
> actually enlarge the community:
>
>
>  If we could hand wave a "yes" it would change a lot of
>> things and create positive feedback in more people resources to fix
>> the map.
>>
>
> I've heard that quite often. "If only we import just a little more, then
> our map will suddenly cross some usability threshold and we'll have more
> users contributing quality data than we can wish for".
>
> I guess it's a matter of faith. I can't prove you wrong but there's no
> evidence to support that hope either.
>
>
>  Anyway. Maybe I'm completely wrong.
>>
>
> Your lament about us having "given up on the output side" is worth
> discussing calmly, at another time, in another thread. It rests on the same
> assumption that more users means more mappers, and I don't like the
> wording, but it might not be *entirely* wrong. The question is, however, if
> the means we have available would allow us to "not give up on the output
> side", or if trying to acquire the necessary means would make us give up on
> something else.
>
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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-- 
Jeff Meyer
Global World History Atlas
www.gwhat.org
jeff at gwhat.org
206-676-2347
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