[OSM-talk] Just facts?

Thu Jun 19 19:47:44 UTC 2014

There are various ways to influence what is mapped.

The Mapnik stylesheet itself has probably a significant impact on what is 
mapped. While it shows commercial businesses including fast-food, no 
mention of doctor clinics, social and community services.
Mappers
 are surely influenced by the Map tools they are using. If they cannot 
see community related POI's, it wont convince them to add these.

Pierre 

________________________________
 De : Johan C <osmned at gmail.com>
À : Talk Openstreetmap <talk at openstreetmap.org> 
Envoyé le : Jeudi 19 juin 2014 15h22
Objet : Re: [OSM-talk] Just facts?

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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