[OSM-talk] [HOT] [OSM-dev] Tool update from HOT: MapCampaigner

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 08 October 2018, Harry Wood wrote:
> [...]
>
> These tools have been known in OSM as "Quality Assurance" tools. To
> Frederik's point, personally I actually think *this* naming, which we
> settled on a long time ago, is weirdly over-broad. We should have
> called them "data checks" or "data bugs" or something, because surely
> "quality" of a map is much more than counting up how many data
> glitches there are, and surely it *does* include how complete the map
> is (e.g. complete with more rich POI coverage)

Actually what we name quality assurance tools (i.e. Osmose, OSMI and 
similar) is fairly similar to techniques used in industrial production 
processes as part of quality assurance and quality management 
endeavours - with the same advantages and limitations.

Like in those cases the term quality assurance is somewhat misleading 
since watching over process parameters and performing automated checks 
on its own does not in any way assure a certain level of quality.  But 
detecting and quantifying quality problems is of course the first step 
towards assuring a certain quality level.

And measuring production quantity is usually not part of a quality 
assurance process - unless it is part of a yield or efficiency 
measurement, i.e. relative quantity.

Of course most of the quality assurance tools we have at the moment only 
measure plausibility and internal consistency of the data.  We have 
only very few automated QA tools that use any kind of outside reference 
to gauge accuracy of the data.

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