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The fallacy in the concept we're discussing here is assuming that OpenStreetMap is being held back by the speed with which we can add infrastructure geometry (I
by sp8962 10y ago
The fallacy in the concept we're discussing here is assuming that OpenStreetMap is being held back by the speed with which we can add infrastructure geometry (I'm specifically excluding mass doodling of buildings as that is a topic on its own, and, hey, google does just fine without buildings nearly everywhere).
Given reasonable quality aerial imagery (on which automatic detection a la Facebook depends too) the limiting factor for years in OpenStreetMap has been meta data collection (names, road attributes, POIs, addresses and so on). Humans are quite fast and good at tracing roads and the couple of minutes it takes to add a few dozens of streets is just inconsequential compared to the time and effort it takes to go there and actually survey and add the meta data.
Now despite some bloggers, that themselves haven't noticed that OpenStreetMap is very different than in 2007 (but you know xkcd 386), claiming that OSM is standing still, the OpenstreetMap community is quite welcoming to new and better ways of surveying and obtaining data. Mapillary and now OSV have made lots of aspects of meta data collection easier and faster and have found wide spread adoption in OSM including automatic sign detection and so on.
But even with such advances, gathering and entering the meta data is still by the order of magnitudes the dominating time consuming process in OpenStreetMap (and for what it is worth in any mapping activity).
- legulere 10y agoTracing buildings by hand is quite time-intensive even with stuff like the buildings plugin for JOSM. And it is a prerequisite for going out and mapping addresses. In cities metadata acquisition might be a much larger thing, but it isn't here on the countryside where I live. Tracing landuse form aerial imagery is probably 90% of what I do here.
- sp8962 10y agoHaving buildings is definitely not a prerequisite for mapping addresses (when I go mapping I will typically and them before too, but again that is only a minor amount of time compared to actually gathering the data). Mass mapping buildings is a rather recent phenomenon in OpenStreetMap and you can have a high quality, fully functional map with not a single building outline (as google shows too). Not to mention that we have had a country with full address coverage since ages that only has a small number of buildings mapped (DK). Now there are certain high detail tasks for which having building outlines make sense: for example adding entrances with addresses, but that is fairly far along on the path of iteratively adding more detail to OSM.
- maxerickson 10y agoI would think a tool that can quickly do high quality building extraction would end up displacing the efforts to add buildings to OSM. Such a tool would have a couple of advantages; the capture dates of the imagery used would be well known and the coverage would be consistent. The projects to add buildings are often hasty and involve lots of people of varying levels of experience (and diligence and so on). Of course, there seems to be a widespread (and incorrect) mindset that working with OSM only is somehow vastly easier than working with OSM plus some external data. It's nice that data added to OSM automatically shows up in lots of places, but it is usually quite straightforward to use other data alongside the OSM data.