[OSM-talk] Suggestion more complete mapping verifactiion

[John Baker]

I started this post because I looked at the map of central London that was
meant to be complete and decided to some roads where I worked many years ago


Heddon Street just off regent street, Central London, W1 was one.

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=529233&y=180753&z=1&sv=heddon+street&st=1&tl=Heddon+Street,+W1&searchp=newsearch.srf&mapp=newmap.srf

I though it would be a good test case a small street and it is/was a
cul-de-sac road with a walkway (no cars can get through) at the north end
not a straight through crescent-like road like streetmap, a to z, etc
display it as. (also then I noticed that Bean Street in OSM is really Beak
Street)

Now the map of that area appears all complete but this road was completely
missing. Before I saw that I had confidence that the data was correct after
I didn't. Of course I can (and will when I am next that way) map it myself
but I have no GPS, etc. I know I can still add stuff but I started thinking
with my IT head on about an easier way to sort this as I have little
confidence in an area of the map that many believed complete and unlikely to
be checked again. I wondered how many other areas like this are there. I
presume someone carefully checked the area like many of you do (street
walking/aerial photos) when mapping an area and simply a street got missed
and it was/is not tagged as missed.

Obviously over time the wiki streetmap will get better but I thought we
could simply compare map data with other (official) sources to get a more
complete map.

I know nothing about mapping and came across this project a week ago by
chance and I do much a fair few open source/free projects on the web and
thought I would help out.

There are 2 issues I can see here:

a) If you could check 100% legally the streets against a known source of
streets would you find this helpful? I cannot see how you would not find
this helpful but many replies here seem to imply this.

I only know about the UK and know little about mapping/street indexes hence
the focus on them here. But surely this would be useful where there is a
complete or even decent legal resource of street names. You can use it in
conjunction with any other system you could check multiple databases against
the OSM data.

I would have thought that some countries out there would have more relaxed
laws about the data and this could be very possible.

To be honest, I seem to be finding hostility towards this idea in general
and I don't understand way. It seem that some like to make things difficult
for themselves and want to do *everything* by hand and don't want help.

It is just a more pro-active way of helping the project progress. If German
has relexed laws about this an a list of streets is know for say Berlin and
if Berlin was nearly finished then we could compare the two. I would have
thought it would really help out say a small group of dedicated mappers that
have nearly completed a city, we missed a few streets there rather than
walking the streets/looking again at the aerial maps of the area that they
think they have mapped perfectly.

Once you have confidence that all the streets are mapped then you can help
promote OSM to local councils, business, etc, etc

In the wiki of the UK there are many cities that state they are nearly
complete (or complete!!) I imagine some of these are done by one or a few
mapper wouldn't it be nice to check their data. I dont mean to damage egos
by saying that sorry you missed x, y, z road.

I find it surprising that you appear not to want to cross reference the data
with another source - or in fact as many sources as possible. All legally of
course.

b) The legality of the UK data.

I am no expert on this but have dealt a fair bit with legal software
licenses and tbh I could not see too much wrong with the RM licenses. I can
understand not wanting to put the project in jeopardy although first you are
likely to get a C&D/takedown notice before any action is taken and open
source project have a lot more leeway to as anyone could just restart the
project again with the data in it. And once started again the companies
would have to prove that data came from there source with what I am saying
there is no way they can.

The data would have been inserted in to the database manually from manually
looking at street signs. I don't care how big your lawyer wallet is I cannot
see anyone holding it up for a new project especially based on the same
data.

I am at a loss once it is in the database who can tell. No Easter eggs will
be there as people have gone by hand to check it like what happened to the
AA.
It is like me comparing the data with the paper AtoZ by hand either looking
at maps and saying that this street doesn't appear on our map.

To be honest any info of street names would be useful even if they are not
complete indexes and I cannot believe that there is no source for some info.
I just don't want to do all that work myself.

I think in general the project should be looking at linking up with more
sources for verification. It seems a shame that no-one considers this.

Cheers,

John

On 17/09/2007, Andy Robinson <Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

> John Baker wrote:
> >Sent: 17 September 2007 6:53 PM
> >To: Dave Stubbs
> >Cc: talk at openstreetmap.org
> >Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Suggestion more complete mapping verifactiion
> >
> >Thanks Dave for the useful reply - so many are not. That explains a
> little
> >more.
> >
> >I was a little presumptuous that his information was available. But also,
> >to be honest, I am surprised that people involved in heavily mapping
> (like
> >many here) do not have street info like this - even if they cannot/do not
> >use it for this project.
> >
> >Yes I understand the potential problems with this data online and stated
> >that before.
> >
> >Anyway here are a few scenarios for you:
> >
> >a) You can still lookup the street data though with the RM or OS etc
> >programs that is what they are for. If I got an "official" street name
> >source from RM, etc and made a list myself, looked those up in the AtoZ
> and
> >and walked around myself. Would it be ok to put this data in
> OpenStreetMap?
> >
> >b) At a mapping party (or follow up mapping parties when it is nearly
> >complete), etc. someone hands people a list of a few names of streets
> that
> >they might want to check out that might have been missed so they can
> lookup
> >in their AtoZ. Would the data collected be ok to be put in OSM?
> >
> >c) If someone posted a link to this newsgroup to a webpage with possible
> >"Easter Eggs in RM street data in Cambridge", etc and people went out and
> >checked this and realised that some of these streets were not in OSM
> >database. Would it be ok to add them? Maybe with links to multmap,
> >streetmap, etc (2 different data sources) of the roads.
> >
> >d) If someone posts to say Heddon Street in London W1 is not in the
> >database here is a link:
> >
> http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=529233&y=180753&z=1&sv=heddon+stree
> >t&st=1&tl=Heddon+Street,+W1&searchp=newsearch.srf&mapp=newmap.srf
> >Is it then OK for someone to walk down Heddon Street with a GPS and map
> >this road in OSM?
> >
> >I wonder what you think of these?
> >
> >I don't want to auto-correct the streets or copy from multimap or
> something
> >that some here seem to think. Just to go out and manually check them.
> >
> >Obviously some can be paranoid with the legal stuff (and it is easy to do
> >so) and on the same level of legal paranoia you probably shouldn't use
> >paper based maps for planning mapping parties but I imagine you do.
> >Obviously caution is needed I am not arguing otherwise.
> >
> >Legal areas are complex but there seems to be a load of leeway here IMHO.
> >
>
>
> That maybe but for the OSM project we don't go looking for that leeway.
> Its
> so much simpler (and indeed safer) to ignore all "official" or even
> "unofficial" sources and gather the data from scratch, that's the whole
> idea
> behind OSM. That way we know it's not tainted in any way other than with
> our
> own editing errors. When I map an area I do it systematically so that in
> theory I don't miss any streets/streetnames. Now and again I know I have
> missed some (failed camera image etc) and I have a list of places I need
> to
> go back to sometime. But then again OSM is a wiki so someone with the
> local
> knowledge can also fill in the missing information at some other later
> time
> if I don't. I'm sure if for each area of the map we posted a list of
> planet
> derived streetnames it wouldn't take very long for the general public to
> add
> a comment via a web form to tell users of a missing street and its
> approximate location related to other streets that already exist in the
> OSM
> database.
>
> Cheers
>
> Andy
>
> Andy Robinson
> Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk
>
>
>
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