On 03/11/14 12:19, SK53 wrote:
Bringing together bookmaker tags is harmless, but does little to gather
Except, possibly that one of the big political issues about such shops is that they now get a lot of their money from fixed odds machines, which means there is no element of bookmaking involved.
The key to getting shop data better is actually to map many more of them. There will be no serious interest in the shop data in aggregate (rather than individual POIs) until it is much more complete. Improving
And more than just collecting the initial data, unless you can actually maintain it is going to be very unreliable. Not only are a very small proportion of shops mapped, but many of them have been mapped by non-local visitors (one in particular) who are only interested in the first time mapping and have no plan in place to regularly re-survey them. This information rapidly becomes stale.
I'd guess you would need almost two orders of magnitude more active mappers before you had any hope of reasonably complete and up to date information on retail outlets, particularly those which are not fashionable in youth culture. I'd estimate the amount of effort required as similar to that needed to map every shop in the country every one to two years. Although we are talking about maybe 20% turnover a year, you still need to go out to the street and compare the details against what is recorded far more regularly than that. Each visit still requires careful checking of the details of everything.
Incidentally, if anyone knows of a pre-written tool that will construct a schedule of premises on a street in strict walking order, I might be interested, as it might make auditing streets mapped by outsiders easier, and therefore encourage me to maintain over a slightly wider area. I prefer paper for this sort of thing, both because it is less likely to attract unwanted attention, and because it doesn't put expensive gadgets at risk.
At the moment, I'm only really tracking two streets, which I visit often enough to notice changes, and for which I can remember what was there the last time.
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