Bill Thoen wrote:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 08:39:09AM -0400, B.K. DeLong wrote:
And, in theory, with an open source, community-contributed dataset
there'd be more people to fix mistakes and keep it more updated due
to various construction and repair activities.
I imagine that a community effort to maintain a data set that represents a
road network would operate in a way similar to a wiki, but how do you
ensure that additions and "fixes" are done with the appropriate precision
and accuracy (and who decides?) Who interprets road classifications and
other attributes that mean different things to different people?
Bill,
These are all issues that the Open Street Map project has struggled with.
The short answers are (I think):
o Like a wiki, there is no guarantee for accuracy, but folks interested
in an area will potentially fix up or improve on poor data. If they
mess it up even more, then hopefully someone else will notice.
o OSM used a fairly general "tagging" mechanism for attributes so that
features could be tagged according to a variety of classification
schemes. Community discussion is used to come up with particular
schemes for particular areas. I think this approach is also sometimes
calls a folksonomy (to distinguish it from a formal top-down taxonomy).
o Interpretation is up to the data generator and user, but it is
definately a hodge-podge.
> Finnally,
what sorts of legal issues are involved in producing a data source that
might be used in public safety applications? Can a community effort
"certify" a certain level of accuracy for use in such applications?
Such datasets are completely not-certifiable. Just like Wikipedia such
datasets can provide a wealth of information, but ultimately you can't
put too much faith in any particular bit of it without checking it
yourself.
Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org
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