OpenStreetMap

Craft mapping is the best method...

Posted by RobJN on 2 October 2017 in English.

…so say a minority of people.

If you read the OpenStreetMap mailing lists, or follow (non-OSM) news then you’d be forgiven for thinking that we live in a world where people’s views have become incredibly narrow. But in shock news from State of the Map 2017 we discover that most people can happily live alongside their fellow mappers.

During my live-polling session at SotM, I asked the audience to participate in a series of questions via the online polling system, DirectPoll. You can watch the video and review the results in full.

But today, say hooray to the 85% who say that “We need all forms of mapping / they are all equally important”.

OSM Live Polling results

Thanks.

Discussion

Comment from imagico on 2 October 2017 at 19:55

Robot mapping is as important as craft mapping based on local knowledge…

…says the majority of the the international OSM jetset visiting SotM - most of them either wealthy enough to pay for an international conference visit or being paid for their visit by their employer.

Most of the mappers forming the backbone of OSM do not post on the international mailing lists but many more of them and a much more representative selection of them than those who visit SotM.

Selling a survey among SotM visitors here as a representative survey of the OSM community is incredibly manipulative and tendentious.

Comment from RobJN on 2 October 2017 at 20:22

@imagico: You are right: SotM was made up of people from Japan, 15 scholars from all other the world, some people from the business world and some mappers from further afield who made it part of their holiday this year.

But the people who continue to shout the loudest on the Mailing Lists are fewer in number so even less representative.

I encourage you to set your own survey up and get that seen by a wide audience. Perhaps you are worried that it will show a similar result :-)

Comment from imagico on 2 October 2017 at 20:56

I give very little on who is shouting the loudest on the mailing lists but if you think that the mailing lists are less representative than a conference with at least several hundred, often probably more than thousand dollars participation threshold for most potential participants you have a really strange perception. But i understand last year’s craft mapper initiative is kind of inviting some compensatory action this year.

Comment from RobJN on 2 October 2017 at 21:46

I’m a proud owner of a Craft Mapper tshirt and it is the group I associate myself with. Have been and always will be due to my lack of technical know-how and love of outdoor mapping :-)

I don’t believe the mailing list is representative in membership (posting or non-posting). I’d go further and say that the visible bit of the mailing list (the posts we read) is less representative than the international SotMs in aggregate (i.e. SotM 2013, 2016 and 2017 combined - those being the 3 I have been to). There are many reasons but this is off-topic here.

As you say, I was lucky to be able to travel to a few events, and I also engage via my support of the scholarship program. From my conversations, I believe that most people are in the category “We need all forms of mapping / they are all equally important” and this post is designed to remind others that may only see a very one-sided argument in some forums.

If you disagree, feel free to offer up some proof. I suspect you don’t disagree, which is why you are twisting the debate into a different topic… :-)

Comment from Warin61 on 2 October 2017 at 22:18

‘Best’ is a subjective term when you have no rules on how it is judged.

In some areas OSM does not have an effective community to do local mapping so satellite imagery mapping is the majority source of the map in these areas. Here the ‘best’ is armchair mapping as that is what is available. If people insist on local mapping only being used the map will be blank on large areas of the globe. OSM should use the most detailed mapping that is available, if that is a local mapper good, if it is a low resolution satellite imagery then that too is ‘good’.

Comment from imagico on 2 October 2017 at 22:56

@RobJN - I think we can only agree to disagree. Everyone else can form their own opinion.

Comment from escada on 3 October 2017 at 05:31

I would say that “speed” is the enemy of a good map. Everything that is done too fast leads to a bad map. This means that any method that supports rapid mapping will more easily lead to a bad map. Imports that are done to fast, tracing of aerial imagery that is done too fast, local mapping that is done to fast.

But while it is easy to quickly do an import or trace something, it is much harder to quickly do local mapping.

Any method is fine, if it is done carefully and where high quality is the goal. The goal should not be having more data sooner. That leads to bad quality.

Comment from Warin61 on 3 October 2017 at 06:00

Tracing can be done zoomed out at a 1km per 2 cm imagery .. and get poor resolution - fast to do large areas .. or zoomed in to say 100m per 2 cm and get more detail.

GPS tracks can be generated with poor resolution too .. takes the same amount of time to do it with better resolution though, just more data storage and more battery drain.

A ‘fast map’ is still better than no map? Meaning a road represented as a straight line between 2 cities shows that it exists. Better with the curves but the line conveys the roads existence. I prefer the curves myself and trace them to a fair degree, including rivers and streams .. and I add these details to others ‘fast mapping’. But I still think the ‘fast map’ is better than no map at all.

Comment from mmd on 3 October 2017 at 09:47

Most disturbing figure in this survey: less than 20% use OSM because they believe it’s the best map in their area (7 out of 37).

Comment from RobJN on 3 October 2017 at 23:23

@Warin61: I think your posts here are very good. I agree, it’s not a speed problem - a ‘fast map’ is better than no map at all (in my view). I think it comes down to who is able to provide the most detailed mapping.

My local community has done an amazing amount of work to take the map from a blank canvas to what it is now. But we know that we are at our limits of detail - we struggle to map buildings as there are just too many of them (i.e. progress is slow) and we struggle to keep up with changes. Big items like road changes are easy, but keeping up to date with changes to shops, bus stops and parking restrictions (3 things all changing quickly where we live) is hard. In places our data had become stale.

To fix this we either need 100x as many mappers or we work with non-craft mappers as they can support the detail that we are unable to (i.e they are best able to provide some of the detail we struggle with). In reality we are trying both approaches - more Craft mappers and more non-Craft mappers is better than just more of one group! I’m delighted to say that the results are looking good - we have reduced the level of stale data via some semi-mechanical edits :-) and there seems to have been a notable increase in new mappers round here recently too (we just need to convert them from occasional mappers to regular mappers).

Comment from Warin61 on 4 October 2017 at 00:31

@ RobJN and escada
Perhaps ‘speed’ is not the right term here .. but a lack of time and number of mappers.

Umm there may be a number of terms we have used here that are not the best.

Map ‘quality’ could be better termed ‘detail’?

Where time is lacking then the result probably lacks detail.

Locally I do use imagery as it speeds things up, imagery with good resolution and applied corrections make mapping correct details easy. I don’t map all the buildings .. just the ones that are of use to lots of people. So individual homes are out of my work space! So too are parking restrictions. Imagery does not get me what the building is used for nor individual shops - that has to be done by survey and takes a lot of time. It also becomes stale to some degree. But even when stale does suggest that a service of some description will exist there. Might be upsetting for some - if they are upset enough they might become mappers - win win. There is a LOT to map, the quantity is large .. no huge! I have a number of things I would like to add to the map - ranging from rivers, streams, roads, tracks, paths, fire hydrants, static water supplies to residential areas and more.

I do not restrain myself to my ‘local’ area. I do add to the map in other areas trying to add, improve. HOT has people remotely add stuff, my remote roaming is usually because I have some interest in the area/feature and have done some research that would at least equal HOT contributors knowledge (I would hope that it exceeds it).

Comment from escada on 4 October 2017 at 14:26

I was not directly referring to lack of detail, just to adding wrong data.

But in my region (Flanders, Northern part of Belgium) there is 1 mapper that did almost all landuse based on aerial imagery. Due all kind of circumstances, a lot of the landuse get mistagged. He can do much more from his chair, than we can check on the ground. I rather have no landuse than a brownfield in the middle of a nature reserve of a vinyard in a totally impossible place.

So yes, armchair mappers can add more incorrect data than “craftmappers” can correct on short term. We also do not have the time to comment on their work in the hope they learn to better interprete imagery, as they moved on to the next topic before we get there. A craftmapper will still be around and will learn for her/his next project.

That’s my problem with “speed with which armchair mappers map” vs. craftmapper.

Comment from ABZ_OSM on 27 July 2020 at 14:07

Having older video’s like the poll presentation video is very helpful.
The results of each poll as well as the question’s asked are very informative.
I learnt about http://blogs.openstreetmap.org from this.
A very helpful aggregated blog :)

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