Challenges of Street Maps

So I was talking to my brother Al today, who is one of the smarter people I have met, and he clearly thought I was too harsh on openstreetmap.org.

I really had no intention to sound too negative. I think that they are one the forefront of inovation. They are applying wiki ideas to geospacial data... that is huge. My point was only that the data they collect is very sensitive, and its very important that it all be right, not only geographically, but also in every minuet detail. If a contributer forgets to mention that a street is one way, or that it doesn't have a sidewalk, etc, a program would not be able to properly use the data, and it would get a bum rep.

I think that the consumer of trail data will initially just be humans. And humans are really flexible in their interpretation of the data they are given. Also, trail data is not as complex, nor is it as important to have 100% accurate. If it's a little off, it won't make a big deal.

Thanks for your input Al, the more I have to think about the idea, and the more we talk about it, the more likely I will be to follow through with it.

alwold: so i started looking at open street map
alwold: and i think it's really cool
doctor wold: yeah... it's real cool
doctor wold: did you read the nerd blog I posted?
alwold: yeah
doctor wold: ahh
alwold: you were talking shit about it
doctor wold: cool
alwold: so thats why i looked at it
doctor wold: nah, not shit
doctor wold: it's just that routable data is so hard
doctor wold: like having people contribute it correctly would be incredibly difficult
doctor wold: and trail data isn't so complex
alwold: right thats why wikipedia is so inaccurate
alwold: cause everyone is too dumb
doctor wold: no
doctor wold: words are easy
doctor wold: people know the right information
doctor wold: but its easy to put it in words
doctor wold: it's harder to turn knowledge of roads into data that is accurate enough to actually use in a program
doctor wold: I think that for prited maps, open street map is great
doctor wold: and could be used very soon
doctor wold: but for routable data, it's very sensitive
alwold: so like you're saying that this would be easy to write
alwold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody
doctor wold: if you know the information then yes
doctor wold: and the information is being used by humans, which are very flexible
doctor wold: with map data it is being consumed by programs
doctor wold: which are not so smart, and flexible with input
doctor wold: anyway... you're opinion is good
doctor wold: and I think that it will be useful at somepoint soon
doctor wold: if they would have started with the tiger data, it would have maybe been useful from the start too
doctor wold: idk