[OSM-talk] Some thoughts against remote mapping

[Christoph Hormann]

On Tuesday 16 June 2015, Alex Barth wrote:
>
> - How can we show better where data is stale?
> - Can we show what's "missing"?

Actually these two points well illustrate an important difference - 
something is missing because someone misses it - this is a subjective 
criterion.  Much of the discussion in this thread revolves around the 
question of differences between locals missing data and non-locals 
doing so and what conflicts might arise from this difference.

So showing prominently that something is missing from a certain 
subjective perspective is always touchy, especially if it is the 
perspective of someone with a broader agenda like a foreign aid 
organization or a company.

The first point on the other hand is probably fairly undisputedly a good 
idea, i.e. indicating quality issues from an objective perspective.  We 
already have a lot of tools in that area of course, address lists for 
example that are used to indicate where addresses are missing.  But 
there is a real lot of potential there, like for example rather than 
importing external data using it to find and indicate differences to 
what is in OSM.  There is much free data out there that could be used 
to very specifically indicate inaccuracies and errors in OSM data but 
not a lot of ressources are used at the moment to make use of this.

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