[OSM-talk] Osmarender 5

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> I see some value in being experimental, standing out from the crowd,
> differentiating OSM maps from all the other maps out there.

Agree in general, disagree about this specific way to stand out from
from the crowd ;-)

> [...] each street on our maps is individually signed by the author. 
> This is an enormous claim of quality

Not necessarily. It can also come across as

"this way information is the sole work of person <x>; we as a project
just pass this information on to you without taking any responsibility
or even trying to assure whether what <x> says is correct; use at your
own risk"

as opposed to TeleAtlas & Co's

"we as a company take responsibility for the data presented here, and
if there is an error, we will see that it is fixed"

Assigning a single name, or maybe two or three names, to a way on the
map somehow, in my eyes, throws away the fact that, for any but the
remotest areas, many OSM contributors have cross-checked the data.

We don't have a proper QA procedure yet (but we probably will one
day), nonetheless there are literally hundreds of roads in Karlsruhe
which I have personally checked, compared with my own experience or
data, cross-checked with other material - but Osmarender 5 suggests to
the cursory reader that these ways are the work of a single
individual. (Even if it would access the history which it doesn't, it
would still look like a single individual at work.) I don't want to
say I deserve credit for that - au contraire - but I want to say that
this work improves the quality of the data far beyond a "(c)
some-person" could ever express.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'