[OSM-talk] Just facts?

Thu Jun 19 19:22:26 UTC 2014

On Thursday 19 June 2014, Frederik Ramm wrote:
<The discussion has been led here on talk and on osmf-talk. A statement
by Emilie Laffray on osmf-talk best summarizes the idea:

"Ultimately, map data is pretty much fact and whether it exists or not
is a binary statement. Now, could someone slip "advertisement" like
places of all shops of a specific brand? Yes! Do we care? No, as long as
the data is factual. I don't care if someone is being paid to put data
in OpenStreetMap as long as this data is correct and valid...">

At SOTM Birmingham a workshop was aimed at mappers who wanted to share
their dreams for OSM in, say, 2020. Results can be found here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Future/Dreams
On the aspect of technique, editing, tools some dreams were:

   - Easy for non-techies to add data
   - Consistent tagging format or rules (described)
   - No federated tagging / worldwide consistency / no federational mappers
   - Ability to move on from poor initial tagging conventions

In my work I have to deal with guidelines involving ultimately some
billions of euros per year. As a professor I spoke about them wisely said:
"you should always try to limit interpretation by improving the guidelines,
but there will always remain room for interpretation no matter how strict
the guidelines are". I think this combination can also work for OSM:
continuously keep on improving the map features (as stated in the dreams),
which are applicable to any mapper, paid or unpaid. Sometimes that leads to
easy black-and-white situations: a motorway should not be mapped as a
footway. But indeed, to a certain extent grey situations will remain. And
the grey situations need interpretation. As a core value, respect will also
mean mappers communicating about the reasons for their interpretation.

Cheers, Johan

2014-06-19 12:06 GMT+02:00 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:

> Hi,
>
>    this is an offspring from the discussion about whether or not we are
> well advised to follow Wikimedia's example of requiring the disclosure
> of paid contributions.
>
> The discussion has been led here on talk and on osmf-talk. A statement
> by Emilie Laffray on osmf-talk best summarizes the idea:
>
> "Ultimately, map data is pretty much fact and whether it exists or not
> is a binary statement. Now, could someone slip "advertisement" like
> places of all shops of a specific brand? Yes! Do we care? No, as long as
> the data is factual. I don't care if someone is being paid to put data
> in OpenStreetMap as long as this data is correct and valid..."
>
> Let us go back in time to when Wikipedia was started. I wasn't there
> then but I am pretty sure that there would have been many at the time
> who naively said something like: "An encyclopedia is a collection of
> facts and knowledge. We can argue how the facts are organised and
> presented but the content is verifiable and clear."
>
> I would probably have agreed. Where and when a composer was born and
> what their most famous work is - clearly a fact, no?
>
> Fast-forward to the present. Wikipedia has learned the hard way that
> there is much less fact and much more open to interpretation than
> initially believed. Meanwhile in OSM, people say: "We don't have the
> same kind of problems as Wikipedia because ours is effectively a
> database of verifiable facts."...
>
> This is undoubtedly true for a number of things in our database - but
> the number of exceptions is much higher than you would naively expect.
>
> Firstly, there are cultural issues mostly to do with names. We have edit
> wars about name tags (most recently, disputed islands in South East Asia
> and territories between Ukraine and Russia) - what is the "name on the
> ground" in an area with active movement of troops?
>
> Another very recent example is a long discussion-cum-edit-war in Germany
> about whether or not something really *has* a German name X
> ("name:de=X") or if that is a thing of past occupation
> ("old_name:de=X"). This is not a fact that you can simply check, it is
> something that requires research and brings us quite far into the
> "[citation needed]" terrain already.
>
> But there are other and much less obscure issues, starting with the
> highway classification. There are no hard and fast rules about what is,
> for example, a primary or a secondary road; this is mainly a distinction
> that we leave to the local mapping community, and yes, there are edit
> wars about that too, and there is potential for edits with an ulterior
> motive (someone who lives on a street might downgrade it from primary to
> secondary to have less vehicles routed there, or to make his property
> look more attractive to a potential buyer).
>
> We have many other situations in which we trust the mapper to do the
> right thing without being 100% verifiable. Track types are an example,
> or indeed the infamous "smoothness" tag. When we map which areas are
> "residential" and which "commercial", there's quite a bit of leeway
> there as well - you can gloss over a supermarket in a residential area,
> or you can cut a hole in the area and mark it differently; you can map
> the whole supermarket parking lot as a parking lot or you can map the
> trees and the little bushes between the rows of cars and make it look
> almost like a park.
>
> Is something just a stream or already a river? Is something just a town
> or already a city? Does the office of a private music teacher count as a
> music school, thereby increasing the quarter's school density?
>
> All these are judgment calls where we trust our mappers to make the
> right decision. All these are a far cry from the "binary statement" and
> the easy fact checking that people often ascribe to OSM.
>
> I believe that it is still true that most of what we collect *is* facts,
> and as long as we stick to the facts we're in the green. It may be
> disputable whether something is tracktype=grade1 or tracktype=grade2 but
> the fact that there is some kind of track in that location is not up for
> discussion.
>
> But this should not make ourselves blind to the fact that there's also
> quite a lot of stuff in our database that is not as easy to fact-check.
> I believe there is ample room to "interpret" reality in a way that is
> not outright wrong, but has a "spin" on it - in OSM as in Wikipedia.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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