[OSM-talk] Things People Say

Yves yvecai at gmail.com
Fri Dec 30 13:30:52 GMT 2011


A lot of good concepts are evoked here, but we should remember that osm, as a lot of open projects is a do-ocracy.
Things that (not involved) people say are good to listen, but in this list this sounds more like things people don't do.
By now, doing things may looks geeky, but there is a need of good geeks to attain the aims of low entry level to map or good maps, more than Osmf can or wants to provide. 
Any takers?
Yves
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Kai Krueger <kakrueger at gmail.com> a écrit :


Toby Murray-2 wrote
> 
> On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Ben Johnson <tangararama@> wrote:
>> You don't hear Wikipedia trumpeting "we are not an encyclopedia, we are a
>> database of information." No... they scream from the mountain tops "we
>> are
>> the world's encyclopedia", and absolutely relish in it.
>>
>> Why can't OSM be also scream from
>> a nearby mountain top, "we are the world's map".... I mean, what's so
>> embarrassing about providing a good, comprehensive, accessible map? It's
>> an
>> accomplishment of which we should all be proud, not hide away.
> 
> [...]
> 
> I do think there is a non-trivial technical difference between OSM and
> wikipedia. The text of a given wikipedia article is 90% of the value.
> It can be displayed as-is and still be useful. Making it pretty and
> user-friendly is relatively trivial with some CSS or whatever.
> 
> Our map data is completely different. It is absolutely useless to most
> people without a rendering process which is much more complicated than
> formatting some HTML. There are color schemes, rendering choices,
> de-clutterification, regional cartographic conventions, etc, etc.
> Which is why we leave it up to other people to do this since they can
> make what they need out of our data.
> 
One can turn that example around by 180°: Despite the fact that wikipedia's
raw data, a XML dump, is so much easier to turn into something usable than
OSM's data, they still put in the effort to present it in a human usable
form.

For OSM with its "useless to most people" data, it is even more important to
present it in a human consumable fashion. This conversion doesn't have to
all be done by "OSMF", but there needs to be a central place with easy to
understand access to all of the various options. Furthermore, if no external
third party provides an adequate and easy to integrate version of something,
then OSMF has to think about if it can support the creation of consumer
facing products, as that is imho essential for the growth of OSM data.

What needs to be overcome is that one currently has to study the
organizational diagram of the OSM project with its hundreds of independent
third party sites, before one can figure out how to get anything useful out
of osm and to avoid getting an unfriendly response of that one is doing it
completely wrong.

Kai

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