[OSM-talk] Area mapping density gap - Was: Wikipedia article

[Christoph Hormann]

On Saturday 26 October 2013, Florian Lohoff wrote:
>
> But isnt the widening gap a very natural thing to happen for a geo
> database? In the end your mappers are distributed unevenly so your
> pace is distributed unevenly. Not everything can be done with
> armchair mapping so we as the one living in the very good mapped
> areas can't help to create a complete map of very sparse mapped
> areas.

Different levels of completeness are natural and as i said at the 
beginning they will continue to exist.  Having a widening range in 
completeness and quality however is not i think.

Note i am not primarily talking about differences between areas far away 
from each other, like between Madagaskar and Germany.  This is fully to 
be expected and i also don't think these differences are generally 
increasing.  Also it would be counterproductive to try reducing this 
mainly through remote mapping from the distance by European mappers.

I am more talking about differences at close range, take for example

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/61.5554/8.4735

where one feature (the lakes) has been mapped to a high level of detail 
while another (the glaciers) is very crude.  Again this is fully 
normal, whoever mapped the lakes might have been focussed on those and 
is not interested in the glaciers or might lack the necessary 
information or skills.  But it seems to me there is very little 
communication on such matters.  Partly this is a matter of having the 
right tools (both map notes and fixme tags are not optimal here) but it 
is also a matter of mapping culture i think.  It bothers me when i see 
such things because they are strongly visible quality issues which 
could be solved with relatively little work.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/