[OSM-talk] Zero tolerance on imports

[Julio Costa Zambelli]

Dear Richard and everyone else,

We have a totally different experience here. We have done some import
processes here in Chile, probably not more than four or five till now, I
talked about the suburban highways import process in my "State of Chile"
presentation in Amsterdam, and after that we added: all the schools and Town
Halls in Santiago; all the Hospitals and municipal/provincial borders in the
Maule Region after the earthquake. This mostly from datasets liberated by
different government agencies, and they have been a total successes (In a
couple of days I will pick-up an external hard drive with more than 150GB of
data liberated by SECTRA, the Government Secretary of Transportation,
including aerial imagery for many of Chiles biggest cities).

Actually right now we are discussing, in the talk-cl mailing list, the
import process of all the bus stops of Transantiago (the transportation
system of Santiago). There are more than 10,000 bus stops in this dataset
(we have manually/randomly tested some of them and the accuracy of the
geolocation is pretty much the same that we get from our "on the ground
survey", the nodes also have the two codes used to identify each stop
something we do not have right now, probably because one of those codes is
a 10~12 characters alphanumeric string). The contributor that did the
request of authorisation for the dataset with the transportation authority
also researched how many bus stops we have added all over the country, and
he told me that there are no more than 700.

So this is not a very difficult decision (700 all over the country versus
more than 10,000 just for Santiago), we have talked (
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-cl/2011-February/000927.html)
about preserving the already surveyed stops, but since the data per bus stop
in the dataset is so complete it doesn't make too much sense to keep
duplicated nodes (in my particular case I probably have added "not included"
data tags like "shelter" or "towards" just to ~10% of my surveyed stops).


What I am trying to say is that not all the import processes are bad, and
the ones well planned, well executed, and broadly discussed in mailing list
and other channels of communication are really good tools for expanding our
coverage _and_ improving the quality of our data.

Cheers,

Julio Costa Zambelli
OpenStreetMap Chile

julio.costa at openstreetmap.cl

http://www.openstreetmap.cl/
Cel: +56(9)89981083
Postal: Casilla 9002, Correo 3, Viña del Mar, Chile



On 19 February 2011 21:03, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:

> This is getting crazy.
>
> Exhibit 1:
> http://twitter.com/#!/maproomblog/status/39053538692698112
>
> "Whoever imported CanVec in Aylmer, Quebec obliterated hours of work and
> introduced hundreds of errors. #osm #openstreetmap #whybother"
>
> Once again, some keyboard jockey has decided that his l337 import skills
> are better than the knowledge and hours of work by a local mapper. The
> offender appears to be user 'sammuell' by the look of it -
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/sammuell - though he hasn't posted
> anything about his activities on the user page, the wiki, or indeed
> anywhere.
>
> This is killing OSM. We are not here to provide a free API to government
> geodata that can be obtained trivially elsewhere. OSM is all about "added
> value"; by deleting genuine surveyed data in favour of mindless duplication
> of other, poorer quality datasets, we are _destroying_ value.
>
> From what I can tell (talk-ca postings etc.) 'sammuell' is a fairly
> inexperienced OSMer who presumably thinks "this is how things are done". It
> isn't. How do we stop this impression taking hold? How do we explain that
> imports are _not_ welcome except as a last resort, and if you do them, you
> _must_ follow a very, very rigorous set of guidelines?
>
> cheers
> Richard
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
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