2012/10/16 Colin Smale <colin.sm...@xs4all.nl> > Are you seriously suggesting that emergency services will trust a satnav > in preference to their own eyes and brains? >
I hope not, and I hope this is true for everyone and not only for emergency vehicle drivers. However, not all places are within eye distance. An ambulance doesn't need a router to see that the target is on the other side of the road, but crossing that solid line may be a part of a much longer route. It may be what makes the difference between a long, convoluted route and a very short one. > Especially a satnav driven by data with no proactive quality control and > no-one you can sue/complain to? And seriously incomplete data? I think you > are looking at a multi-year project to get all this information into OSM > (read: "review and correct the tagging and topology of every road in the > database") while all the time thousands of people are adding new "bad" > data? A popular dutch saying "mopping up with the tap still running" comes > to mind. > So let's shut down any publishing service of OSM data. They're incomplete! How can you trust incomplete or inconsistent data to tell you where you should go to go to that restaurant? OSM's data is not "seriously incomplete". And I understand the difference between day-to-day map needs and emergency needs. But if I were an ambulance driver heading to an unknown place, maybe one in the countryside, I'd much rather use OSM, where tracks are marked as tracks, than Google Maps or Tom Tom, where tracks are usually marked the same way as a primary or secondary road. Besides, if an emergency service were interested in using OSM, it would be easy for them to update the map as real-world changes happen. Not the same with a commercial map. But I hope you know all the advantages by now. > Let's not have a purely hypothetical debate, let's keep it practical. > Assuming that emergency services currently use satnavs (consumer or > special-purpose) based on commercial data, what would they say if we asked > them "what would you need from OSM data to make it a better choice than > your current supplier?" I can imagine that the time delay between changes > on the ground and their availability in a map update might be one concern; > inappropriate road classifications might be another. I would like to hear > it from them, though. Then we can look at the requirements and assess > whether it is a viable project. > It's not a purely hypotetical debate. Nobody here is saying that we should use some who-knows-what tag because possibly maybe I-think-that it could be a useful information in some absurd situation. We are just saying that mapping a road with two non-communicating ways where the two ways would actually have to be communicating is not only wrong from a conceptual point of view, but it also creates errors and hard-to-understand representations of a simple reality for data consumers. Seriously, I can't see why we're complicating this! Regards, Simone
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