[OSM-talk] Bing maps is misplaced

[Richard Fairhurst]

Joseph Reeves wrote:
> An example from my recent past: We display OSM imagery on our 
> website to show people where our offices are. We have one office 
> that was in a town poorly covered by OSM. When the OS Open 
> imagery became available I traced chunks of the town into OSM

Why not just display the OS OpenData imagery on your website and cut out the
middleman? ;)

There can certainly be a case for strategic 'remote mapping' work. Way back
when, the aim was to get placenames into OSM (from NPE, mostly). Soon
afterwards, we had a push to get all the UK's A and B roads mapped; a fair
amount of that involved NPE tracing. More recently, sometimes there are
small strategic gaps in OSM coverage that can be trivially fixed to make the
map much more useful (for a long time there was a half-mile gap in the
mapping of the C2C, Britain's most popular long-distance cycle route). 

And so on. These resulted in significant improvements in OSM coverage with
little or no impact on local mappers, who still had plenty to do. At the
other end of the scale, an occasional five-minute trace of a couple of
footpaths might not be significant - but who could really object to it?

But _intensive_ tracing can and does kill people's motivation. Doesn't
matter whether you think the people are misguided or pompous, it happens.
I've seen it in Worcester, in the East Midlands, in Northern Ireland.

The result is that, rather than having the best map available, we merely
have (especially in the case of OS OpenData) a carbon copy of a map you
could download from somewhere else - and pissed-off mappers who no longer
want to make it any better.

Of course there are compromises. I think in your example I'd have asked the
local mapper "oh, sorry, I wouldn't want to make your volunteer work less
enjoyable - but it would be great for us if we had a map we could use by
this time next month. Would that be ok?".

But if you have an itchy mouse finger and it's cold outside, why not choose
one of the a million and one other ways to make the map better - without
endangering the enthusiasm which is OSM's greatest asset? TIGER fixup is the
most important. Find an untouched US city and align the geometry - so much
more beneficial to the future of OSM than tracing Budleigh Salterton from OS
StreetView. You can trace woodlands, lakes, rivers, building outlines and
other things less suited to local survey. And there's also all the big
non-mapping problems that hold OSM back and sorely need volunteers to tackle
them (abysmal docs etc.)...

There's so much to do. It's got to be more efficient for tracers to tackle
the bits that _aren't_ being catered for by local mappers.

cheers
Richard


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