[Geodata] wiki-nature geodata aggregators

Mikel Maron, OSM mikel at osmfoundation.org
Sun Jul 26 15:53:29 EDT 2009


Well said Andrew.

I'll also add that just because a geodata set has a stamp or "authority", and some apparent quality assurance process, 
does not mean that the resulting data is any better, or the process any more full proof, than the many eyes approach of OSM.
The "man behind the curtain" of authoritative geodata is that the processes are actually less comprehensive (a certain NMA
that shall remain nameless does not even track which individual surveyor & cartographer were responsible for which bits
of data) and often of lower quality. And that's with tremendous amount of more money and time than OSM has had!

Not to say that there's nothing OSM can learn from traditional map makers .. we're not that full of ourselves!
But certainly there's widespread acknowledgement that "they" can learn from "us" as well. The efforts that Andrew
mentions, to feedback crowdsourced data into official sources, are some of the most interesting problems in our field
right now.

-Mikel


________________________________
From: Andrew Turner <ajturner at gmail.com>
To: Martin Spott <Martin.Spott at mgras.net>
Cc: geodata at lists.osgeo.org
Sent: Saturday, July 25, 2009 10:03:41 AM
Subject: Re: [Geodata] wiki-nature geodata aggregators

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Martin Spott<Martin.Spott at mgras.net> wrote:
> Jo Walsh wrote:
>
>> "It would be nice" to see a data quality push - not in terms of
>> comparison to proprietary sources, but in terms of peer review and of
>> spreading, well, quality assurance, through the network back up to
>> original data providers. How to do this without bureaucratic overhead
>> (or while funding bureaucratic overhead)? Answers on a postcard...
>
> No idea, as the conceptual 'design' behind all these data providers
> requires their sources to be "authoritative" in some way - a criteria
> that is unlikely to be met by any effort which relies primarily on
> crowdsourcing  :-)

I disagree. You're seeing OSM and GeoNames powering the data systems
of more companies and organizations. They are leveraging scale,
development and communities that none of these individual groups could
begin to enable themselves.

There have been efforts to incorporate data back into original sources
- a problem that has social, legal, and technical hurdles. Yet the
onus can be on the receiving organization to incorporate this
potentially very valuable data instead of putting that burden on the
larger community itself to attempt to cater to each group.

What I think we'll see more of are organizations just embracing these
projects and data sources as their primary source itself and
enhancing. The problem here is the licensing for databases like OSM is
"viral", so any changes would have to be opened back up - so the goal
here would be to convince government and other agencies that their
value doesn't lie in their hoarding the data, but curating and
ensuring it's coverage and accuracy in their specific areas of
interest. This removes the technical burden of them developing tools
(their not tool shops) or pulling together various domains and
connecting with regions outside their own area. The added benefit is
it engages them directly with the community that also cares in using
the data through these aggregation hubs.

Andrew

>
> Cheers,
>        Martin.
> --
>  Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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-- 
Andrew Turner
mobile: 248.982.3609
andrew at fortiusone.com
http://highearthorbit.com

http://geocommons.com           Helping build the Geospatial Web
Introduction to Neogeography - http://oreilly.com/catalog/neogeography
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