[OSM-talk] Doing God's Work / Oliver Kuehn interviews Jack Dangermond
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Sun Oct 10 18:57:28 BST 2010
Hi,
Alexrk wrote:
> Frederik, you held a presentation at the "Amtliche Daten vs.
> OpenStreetMap" track at the Intergeo? Could you tell us something about it?
There was a session with three talks of 20 minutes and then a combined
questions block of another 30 minutes; the whole session was placed at
the end of the last day.
The three speakers were Mr Ludwig from the Bavarian ministry of finance
(they are the keepers of Bavarian geodata), Mr McCutcheon of DDS, a
large commercial geodata Navteq reseller and provider of other
commercial geodata, and myself. The mood was amicable; I think every one
of us had some respect for what the others did.
Ludwig presented an impressive array of geodata held by the state of
Bavaria - stuff that we could never dream of collecting (and lots of
stuff that we wouldn't take even if offered for free, lots of stuff that
could never be run in a crowdsourcd fashion). They have the kind of
geodata that allows farmers to plan which crops to plant where, the have
geological data, a precise DGM, and much more. Compared to what they
have, OSM is more of a "mass market dataset". They must be spending an
immense amount of manpower on developing and complying with standards,
not only between the different federal states in Germany but also
internationally. It is important to note that whatever they collect,
they usually collect that for the whole state of Bavaria - not only for
a few hotspots; and with 70,000 sq km Bavaria is not exactly small. Last
not least, their data is often an ingredient in legal disputes of all
sorts, so it needs to be "official". But between the lines you could
also hear that Ludwig seemed a bit unhappy that all this data they have
was put to relatively little use, and was generating relatively little
headlines - obviously (to me) because it was not freely available. He
said that they're already giving full access to their data to schools
and he was very open to cooperating with OSM, however it was clear that
he was hoping for OSM to settle down a bit and become more
reliable/established, ideally use a fixed data model and so on.
After that, I gave a brief introduction into OSM (my slides are
available at http://www.geofabrik.de/media/2010-10-07-intergeo-osm.pdf),
highlighting how quite a number of government agencies in Germany are
now using OSM data and asking the question why (could it be that
official data is difficult to get your hands on even if you are the
German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology - who have recently
launched a map displaying broadband availability based on OSM?). I
openly acknowledged that OSM has its disadvantages - mainly that we do
not offer any quality assurances and that coverage is often deep not broad.
In the last talk, McCutcheon provided some in-depth comparisons between
commercial data and OSM data (and some government sources too),
acknowledging that OSM was often superior to commercial data for leisure
uses, but, as expected, lacking basic data in rurual areas. He claimed
that roads in OSM were often lacking attribution (I didn't have a chance
to discuss - I assume that for him, attribution would mean a minimum
basic set of attributes including stuff like maxspeed because name and
highway type are present in the majority of OSM roads). He named the
share-alike license as a major drawback, but concluded that any GIS
project needs to carefully analyze the needs and then decide which -
OSM, commercial, or governmental - set of geodata might be best suited.
In the questions session I told the story of a German fire department
who are now using OSM data in addition to their other stuff after they
recently were unable to fight a fire that had broken out in a building
under a power line and they couldn't find out the operator of the power
line in time. After the fact, they were told that OSM properly had the
operator of the power line noted which got them interested. I used that
example to make the point that while the government may have all sorts
of cool data, even the government doesn't know where to find it. Ludwig
said that they're working on consolidating all the metadata they have
(what with EU projects like INSPIRE etc.) so "in a year or so" nobody
should have an excuse not to find the right dataset for the information
they're after; to which McCutcheon replied that finding the right data
for people was his core business model and he guessed that it might take
a while longer than a year before you can easily find out where to get
which data from.
We parted as friends; I'm sure that there will be further cooperation.
One of the problems Ludwig had with OSM was that for him and his
administration, OSM didn't have "a face" - he would really like to have
one person to talk to and to build relationships with. Consequently, we
have decided to make Joachim Kast (who already attended the recent
Geodata summit at the Ministry for the Interior) our (German) official
contact person for talking to government and administration. We still
expect local mappers to take the lead and won't overrule them but
whenever they reach a point where their counterpart wants to talk to
someone "higher up" we'll send in Joachim.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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