[OSM-talk] Openstreetmap most up-to-date map

[Mikel Maron]

Congrats! That is something special, to be the first ever mapper..
I've had that privelage myself a couple times, in Brighton there's load of new development below the train station;
and in San Jose, before Where 2.0, I did a bit of acquisition on former apple orchards
http://brainoff.com/weblog/2006/06/05/1156

Ironically, one common criticism of OSM is that the data will never be as accurate as traditional providers.
Yet it's exactly the opposite .. OSM is more accurate and current due to its openness and trust, while other
commercial and government estimates have about 1-2 year turn around on distributing changes
(from the actual change, to notification, to ground truthing, incorporation in their db, to distribution to customers
and printing). 


In the UK, there are companies which simply monitor changes with local authorities to produce geographic
change notification reports. Navteq and TeleAtlas has made arrangements with local authorities to receive changes,
and also employ screen scraping to gather data.

http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/mapquest.html

As you say, there's no common format for publishing changes, or distribution or notification system. 
Truly this information is in the public domain, but those producing it lack the resources to make it useful.
Hence, private companies stepping in to aggregate.


There's nothing stopping us from doing this in an open way. 

Jo Walsh did a bit of work, screen scraping planning applications in East London. 
I used that data for visualization http://worldkit.org/londonplanning/

It doesn't necessarily require precise geo-referencing of the changes. With a general idea of the area a particular source
is coming from, that gives enough to notify interesting humans into investigating further. This will be the biggest
challenge once an area is complete .. keeping track of changes in a completed OSM area.


I could see this as a distinct project. Sources of change can be identified, and scrapers configured, within a wiki, 
similar to katrina list. This populates a database with fuzzy georeferencing. GeoRSS feeds are available for 
subscribing to change in a particular area. Such a useful thing, in the public interest, I could see finding support for this.


-Mikel

----- Original Message ----
From: Simon Hewison <simon at zymurgy.org>
To: talk at openstreetmap.org
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2006 4:58:06 PM
Subject: [OSM-talk] Openstreetmap most up-to-date map

This morning, I passed a set of council workers, along with people-in-suits 
unveiling a new street name sign on a previously unnamed street.

Chaville Way, London N3.

This is now named as such in Openstreetmap, and is to my knowledge the first 
map to have that street named.

Even Barnet council's own GIS system doesn't have it named.
In fact, it looks like the council haven't followed their own procedure to 
advise the relevant organizations (Royal Mail, Ordnance Survey, Emergency 
services etc) of naming and numbering of streets.

I've recently also received a response from the local authority about 
notifications of new street naming and numbering decisions, for which they 
have been publishing them, but in a PDF-file per decision, in a 
human-readable form, with no map references or co-ordinates. There appears 
to be no standard way for local councils to publish these.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Potential_Datasources#Local_authority_street_naming_notifications

-- 
Simon Hewison

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