In the Wikipedia topic Christoph Hormann said >Although this is difficult to back up with numbers i have the impression >the gap between well mapped and badly mapped areas in Openstreetmap >is widening even though you would think it is much easier to improve a >badly mapped area than a well mapped one.
This is something that has been on my mind as I compare my two main areas of mapping. My home country of Iceland (mostly detailed and currently looking at imports from the national land registry, via proper channels) and Botswana, another sparsely populated country, one sorely lacking in data.
My first task was to find the 2011 Botswana Census and make sure all of the towns and villages there were on the map. Most of them weren't so I enlisted the aid of Wikipedia (the Italian one actually has the most detail!) to find their GPS co-ordinates. Then I started to draw roads and buildings in Bokspits, the southernmost village, and its surroundings. Soon I figured that this would not be the most efficient use of time, rather I should focus on at least connecting each of the town/villages to the road network. That is currently my focus and I created a MySQL table to make it easier to have an overview over which are connected to road network and which are yet to be connected.
Botswana was, and still is, pretty lacking in details outside of its largest cities. So it is a badly mapped area. Iceland is a well mapped area but still lacking details, so I created a taskboard in Trello to give us a to do list. This list shows on the leftmost column those town villages lacking imagery (Vantar loftmyndir), lacking buildings (Vantar byggingar), in progress (Í vinnslu) and finally completed (Búið), meaning roads and buildings have been mapped. URL: https://trello.com/b/dn0f5v5p
I started to set up a similar list for Botswana but soon found that 498 towns spread over 7 such task boards was very unwieldy!
So the Icelandic OSM community, which formed Hliðskjálf, a society for free and open GIS data, last Thursday, decided to start to work on some sort of Quality Inspector. Currently all discussions about it are only available in Icelandic but once our ideas are better formed we will switch to English for wider discussion.
The basic idea is to be able to create automatically an overview of a locality within a region, listing for example number of emergency services within it, education facilities, roads, buildings etc. Then human input gives ratings for various things like how much of the road network is done, how many buildings, cycling and pedestrian network etc. It will probably require substantial work to set it up but once it is up and running it should make it easier to notice sore thumbs, areas completely or mostly lacking in data, wether on a global scale or a more local scale. Another idea is to run differentials on it every month or so, making it easier to notice if a place is suddenly shooting up in services or buildings or whatever metric, meaning a mapper is working on it, one we can perhaps support, and if needed, gently and tactfully help him/her improve his/her work.
We plan to run Iceland and Botswana into it for initial testing and hopefully, if it proves to work, to open it up for others to import their own areas.
As said, currently all we have on it is in Icelandic and it is still on the drawing board but we are working on prototyping and converting to English.
best wishes, Jóhannes
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