[OSM-talk] OSM is not the place for dissemination of authoritative data sets

[Mikel Maron]

Frederik, you’re crying out against phantoms, and getting stuck on one interpretation of the word “authoritative”, and using that misinterpretation as an excuse to beat on one of your favorite punching bags, and try to exact radical unrational restrictions on a piece of software.
What Facebook is saying here is that RapiD can make the technical part of the import process easier. It’s a well done conflation process that has every single new feature individually examined by a mapper.
There is nothing here about circumventing our well defined import guidelines, or disrespecting our basic tenets. It’s just your imagination.
There are totally rational ways to engage with an idea like using rapid for conflation. Let’s do that, and figure out how we can make OSM better with productive conversation.
Mikel

On Thursday, March 19, 2020, 7:28 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

Hi,

a propos a recent statement from our friends at Facebook in which they
make plans for the future of our project,

https://tech.fb.com/map-with-ai-updates/

> Beyond AI-based data sets, one of the biggest challenges for OSM is importing even readily available authoritative data sets
> ...
> our hope is that RapiD can become a tool that’s simple enough for anyone to import and verify new data sets and to make use of these powerful tools

I would like to reiterate that the "challenge" is not that it is
difficult to import "authoritative data sets"; the problem is that
authoritative data sets are fundamentally incompatible with the way we
operate in OpenStreetMap. To quote just an obvious example, the
government of India certainly has an authoritative data set about where
their boundaries are, it's just that this does not align with facts on
the ground and hence our data is different. The past has shown that
petrol station chains also have "authoritative" data sets about their
stations but they are riddled with bugs, and not suitable for wholesale
import.

I think that someone who cannot respect these basic tenets of
OpenStreetMap - that mappers on the ground have the last word on what
gets into OSM and what not - shouldn't be allowed to publish software
that interacts with our database. I think we should disallow any
contributions made with RapID/map-with-ai and friends.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"

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