[OSM-talk] OSM the mediocre alternative (was: don't like you etc.)

[Tom Chance]

On Saturday 21 April 2007 04:59:41 Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Today, quality standards are much higher, as a lot of terrain is covered
> by Wikipedia articles and things get more refined. There are still
> niches of course, where the subject is such specialist matter that the
> user base shrinks dramatically, but overall it has reached a level where
> many, many people would be hard-pressed to find any topic they could
> write on or an article they could improve!
>
> We, too, will soon reach a situation where most of the ground is covered
> and "worker ant" mappers will be out of business. Karlsruhe, where I
> live, is almost complete; a few finishing touches, a few footways here
> and there, and maybe we'll make an effort to exhaustively map all public
> telephones, pharmacies, letter boxes, and restaurants, and if we think
> that's not enough we can do speed limits or spend endless hours on
> minuscle details of a few complicated junctions to make them "look
> right"... but it gets more fine-grained all the time, and the times
> where any Newbie could grab is GPS and get mapping in Karlsruhe are
> over. You will soon need specialist knowledge to improve mapping here.

There are two big differences that I think we should bear in mind.


1. With Wikipedia there are tools to make it easy for people to see what is 
changing, and when something does make a change it's not all that difficult 
for somebody to spot a fraud or mistake. With OpenStreeMap we don't really 
have tools that are good enough yet - the RSS feeds are very, very 
primitive - and even if somebody did add something I'm not going to know if 
it's correct. I'm certainly not going to go on several long bike rides each 
weekend to see if a pharmacy is indeed called "I.P. Freely" and a road is 
called "Roger Way". In this sense we're even more mediocre than Wikipedia at 
the moment and that may remain the case, especially as people (quite rightly) 
create more usable tools.

These make me think that at some point the current OSM database is going to 
need to be locked down, probably by area given the disparity of coverage, 
with only trusted people allowed to make changes to the core data, just to 
protect it from many malicious changes.


2. There is more scope, I think, for endless derivative uses. People might 
want to make maps of their local favourite haunts, of gay-friendly clubs and 
pubs, of pleasant walks for a sunday afternoon, for a community regeneration 
project (as I did at work this week). I hope OSM reaches a point where the 
data is good enough to mean I can stop using MultiMap, and that it then goes 
beyond -- either as part of the core project or as a series of spinoffs, OSM 
provides a platform for all kinds of interesting things that people can then 
do with the data/pictures. In this way we can be much better than most other 
mapping projects out there, offering both far more data and more 
interactivity. Already the slippy map in well-mapped areas is much nicer and 
more informative than the main online offerings :)

Regards,
Tom

-- 
| Green Party Speaker on Intellectual Property and Free Software |
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