[OSM-talk] Suggestion more complete mapping verifactiion

[John Baker]

On 18/09/2007, D Tucny <d at tucny.com> wrote:

I think that in cases like this, i.e. you looked, you know some things are
wrong and/or missed, but you don't have the tools or are not in the right
place to be able to resolve the issue, then some easy way of reporting the
inaccuracy could be useful... Something along the lines of the tomtom error
reporting whereby you point at the place and give a text description of the
issue, e.g. Heddon St missing, off Regent St between New Burlington St and
Vigo St... As long as this was typed in by people, and didn't lead directly
to changes to topology, shape or names, i.e. someone took that information
as a hint for where to go resurvey an area, then I think that any data that
came from it is clean and safe, probably even if as a user, you noticed and
reported this inaccuracy with the aid of 3rd party sources... Though how we
publish these reports is a tricky one... We want as many people as possible
to see what errors have been reported so they can fix them, but, if these
reports have been based on copyrighted data, we shouldn't be publishing
them...

As far as I'm aware, it's perfectly OK to for example, look at google maps,
look at OSM, and if you see differences, add them to whatever route you are
next planning on taking armed with GPS, camera, notebook etc... As long as
the actual data entered into OSM is from having visited and taken pictures
of signage, the data is clean, i.e. nothing has come from google maps at
all, except information used to plan a route which took you to areas that
weren't in OSM where information was independently gathered... But... OSM
can't publish other people's information without a license to do so, so we
couldn't for example capture bits of multimap's maps, modify them to
highlight areas that have been missed then publish them on OSM sites, while
the data that is entered into the database might well be safe, having been
captured correctly, the issue would be the fact that we'd misused multimap's
maps in our planning... equally, if we did something like produce and
publish some form of 'diff' of maps between OSM and multimap's maps, that
would also be dodgy...

 You saying 'Bean St' is actually 'Beak St' as an example... OK, in this
case you do really know the road, but, lets say you'd used your PAF to find
this error and didn't know the road... What do you do? Compare it to google
maps? also shows Beak St, compare it to Multimap, also shows Beak St, so,
just update OSM? NO... Because then, you've taken the name data from PAF,
google and multimap, the data is dirty... It's not legal... You could go
visit it yourself, take the photo of a road sign that says it's Beak St,
then go home and update it, that's fine... You could let some individuals
know that you believe that Bean St is actually spelled Beak St having looked
at a number of non-free data sources, they could go take some photos and
update OSM, that's fine. You could post a page on the wiki with this and all
other names you found to be wrong or missing, not fine, again, publishing
data sourced from non-free data sources is bad... so, yes, checking is
important and people do want to do this, but it must also be legal...
====

OK some progress here. To be ultra safe.

What about a page where people post links (multimap, googlemaps, etc) to
streets that are missing from OSM for a given city?

Are you saying you think that would/would not be ok?

If I create such a page would some admin remove it?

I don't want to auto-update the OSM and change the info based on maps. I
want people to go out and map themselves.

============
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.

>
> Yep, great, that could be very useful... But, the problem is that the key
> word there is 'If'... We don't have that data... If all map data worldwide
> was PD, it would make it even easier, but then, we probably wouldn't be
> trying to create a map, we'd probably be working on doing some other cool
> stuff with all the free data around...
>
>
Obviously I don't know the Ifs for every country/area I just presume it is
feasible to have legal list/index of street names per city in some countries
where there the map data is copyrighted.
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