[OSM-talk] OpenPlantMap

[Lars Aronsson]

Steve Hill wrote:

> Peter Miller wrote:
> 
> > I agree. I think we need to adopt a Wikipedia concept of 
> > 'notability'. For example... A wood is notable, a large 
> > established solitary tree in a park
> 
> I'm afraid I see the notability criteria as one of Wikipedia's 
> biggest problems so I would hate to see OSM go the same way.  
> I've seen too many


Please, the two are not comparable.  To my own surprise, I have 
turned into a supporter of deletions on Wikipedia.  Not 
indiscriminate, of course, but in certain cases, and they are more 
frequent than I had thought at first.  But the same reasons are 
not present in OpenStreetMap.

Instead of the keep/delete issue, it would be useful for 
OpenStreetMap (in the API and JOSM) to clearly indicate when an 
object was last edited.  If I look at a part of a city and ask 
myself, whether this crossing really is a roundabout, then it 
would be useful to know if that information was added in 2008 or 
2006.  This is a problem we didn't have in 2006, because we had no 
areas that were mapped two years earlier.  Now we have that.

It could also be useful to be able to validate (check, confirm) 
older map features, e.g. this motorway was drawn by SteveC in 2006 
and was validated (timestamped but not altered) by LA2 in 2008.  
It could be as simple as adding a tag "validated=2008-05-17/LA2". 
Then we could have people go around and validate all objects that 
haven't been touched in, say, five years.

> The point is: why should anyone care about notability so long as 
> the data is useful, accurate and maintained?

In our case, the point is that it's hard to know (or will be in a 
few years) whether data is maintained or not.  How can you tell?



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se