[OSM-talk] Zero tolerance on imports

[Peter Budny]

Anders Arnholm <anders at arnholm.se> writes:

> 2011-02-21 16:03, Peter Budny skrev:
>
>> Those of you who think all automated or semi-automated data
>> contributions are harmful to OSM are dooming this project to never be
>> able to grow to become a leading source of mapping data.
>
> The bigger the data base, the less useful automates imports, or I'm i
> missing something?

On the contrary... the bigger the database, the more we need tools to
help us understand and manipulate the data.  When there are only 100
POI nodes in a city, I can easily check them all by hand.  When there
are 100000, that's when automated or semi-automated tools are necessary.

Sorry, I avoided your question.  As for imports: the bigger OSM gets,
the harder it is to ensure coverage.  If I got the supposed McDonald's
POI dataset, how would we know whether OSM already has 100% of them, or
only 98%?  That's a lot of McDonald's to check... what if we miss one?
So even if the data isn't "imported", it's still valuable.

This discussion has somehow conflated robots and tools with imports, and
that may be partially my fault.  But if we had better tools for
performing imports, it might be easier to stitch them together with
existing hand-edited data, and imports wouldn't be such a destructive
process.
-- 
Peter Budny  \
Georgia Tech  \
CS MS student  \