[OSM-talk] Building Equals Yes

Eugene Alvin Villar seav80 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 8 17:05:31 BST 2011


Hi,

Based on a sampling of WOEIDs your reverse geocoder has assigned to
buildings in my metropolitan area, I can say that the only
consistently correctly assigned "woe:" tag is the country tag. And
basing on the Key Concepts link you provided, the WOEIDs seems to be
centrally managed and not crowd-sourced. It seems that the only avenue
for correction is the GeoPlanet forums and I think it would be a
headache to try to get the WOEIDs corrected for my region since the
problem is massive. (I've also checked the hierarchy of places in my
region and they are very wrong.)

So, no, I am not in favor of importing the woe:* tags at least in my
region since it would be tantamount to importing bad data.

Eugene


On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 11:24 PM, straup <straup at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> [I made buildingsequalyes.spum.org]
>
> First, thanks to everyone for their kind words about the project! It's been
> a couple of weeks since it was pushed out the door and I've mostly been
> letting it "bake" to see if anything breaks and to solicit comments and
> suggestions.
>
> The "=yes" part will be corrected in the next version/release. I was not
> aware that there were people tagging buildings with more specific values so
> the next dump will filter on "building=*" although the project name will
> stay the same since "buildingequalssplat" doesn't have quite the same ring.
>
> Second, I've seen a few people express concern over a comment I made on the
> site's about page to the effect that I wanted to import all the WOE IDs [1]
> (for neighbourhoods, localities, etc.) that I had associated with each of
> the building way as new tags. For example:
>
>        # k="woe:locality" v="3534"
>        # k="woe:region" v="2344924"
>        # k="woe:country" v="23424775"
>
>        http://buildingequalsyes.spum.org/woeid/3534/
>
> So, I'd like to toss the idea out there and ask: Will this make people upset
> and if so why? It's obviously something I think would be interesting but
> it's also not something I want to pick a fight with people over.
>
> I know there have been some very bad experiences in the past with any kind
> of bulk import but, on that level, this seems different. Specifically it's
> only adding new (and easy identifiable by the "woe:" prefix) tags to
> existing ways and not touching any other data.
>
> Personally, I've long wanted to have a way to query OSM by "place" rather
> than geography and this is one way to do that. I was reading the wiki page
> for XAPI, this morning, and seeing the proposed "search by region" extension
> seems like much the same thing so maybe I'm not alone?
>
> There's nothing inherently special about WOE identifiers over others except
> that a) I am familiar with them (I used to work at Flickr) b) it's an open
> dataset which means whatever thrashing around Y! does going forward won't
> have any effect on them c) the ~200M geotagged photos at Flickr all of which
> have WOE IDs. [2]
>
> The WOE IDs themselves were derived by using Flickr's reverse geocoder [3]
> which I can guarantee you makes some weird/just plain wrong suggestions. I
> know this because I wrote the reverse geocoder but it also means I have more
> confidence in it than the results that come back from other services.
>
> To the extent that there are errors in the buildingsequalsyes collection
> most of the results are correct and one benefit of getting them in to OSM
> would be to have the WOE IDs vetted by the many eyes of the community.
>
> And if we can do that then there is also the opportunity to start to create
> shapes for those places, using all of OSM, in the same way that Flickr
> generated their shapefiles using geotagged photos. [4]
>
> This is not something I want to do if it's going to upset or freak people
> out. If they need to those mappings between WOE IDs and OSM way IDs can
> always live outside OSM but I think it would be useful if they were part of
> the larger whole.
>
> Crazy talk?
>
> --
>
> [1] http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/guide/concepts.html
> [2] For example: http://www.flickr.com/places/3534/
> [3] http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.places.findByLatLon.html
> [4] http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/10/30/the-shape-of-alpha/
>
>
> On 5/23/11 2:50 PM, Robin Paulson wrote:
>>
>> On 17 May 2011 17:29, Michal Migurski<mike at stamen.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> By my colleague Aaron Cope:
>>>
>>> "building=yes is a searchable and linkable index of every singleway
>>> tagged building=yes in OpenStreetMap (OSM).
>>>
>>> A web page for every building in OpenStreetMap!
>>
>> i love it. excellent, and very imaginative.
>>
>> great title too
>>
>
>
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