[OSM-talk] Quality assurance strategy?

[Jukka Rahkonen]

Frederik Ramm <frederik <at> remote.org> writes:
 
> What you're speaking of is a huge amount of work if one wants to do  
> it properly. I have no doubts that we'll manage to map the world  
> once, but will we be able to map it again every 5 years, essentially,  
> to verify? I don't know.

It is big amount of annoying work. In a somehow analogous GIS production system
we need one full-time supervisor for every 10-15 digitizers.
 
> I have been thinking about a system where you do not wait for people  
> to take responsibility and say "this way is correct as of <date>,  
> signed <name>", instead turn this around: The quality of an area is  
> not defined by the number of quality assertions, but by the absence  
> of error reports!
> 
> Suppose you have a really easy error reporting mechanism right on our  
> central map page, a big fat "report error here" button. Suppose that  
> you cleverly analyse log files (and those of mirrors/caches  
> obviously), so you know how many people have looked at a certain area  
> within the last month (and perhaps even how long they have looked).  
> Then you can say: "150 people have looked at the map you're seeing  
> without reporting an error". Of course only a fraction of viewers  
> will notice an error and only a fraction of those will report it, but  
> if the numbers are high enough, you should get reliable statistical  
> effects.

Extra easy reporting system souds good. Perhaps something that could be used
without a need to register, but that still sends nodes with error reports to the
main database so that they could be queried with all the OSM editing tools?  

> >  OSM quality supervisors
> *shudder* 

I share the feeling actually. But I bet that you have heard questions like How
complete/accurate/reliable OSM data are, haven't you?

> Bye
> Frederik
>