Das finde ich gegenüber einem Anwender gut argumentierbar: Die Stärke des OSM-Materials besteht darin, dass der erstellenden Community Qualität vor Quantität und Aktualität vor Vollständigkeit geht. Die Qualität entsteht dadurch, sich auf sichere Informationen aus erster Hand (persönliche Erkundung) zu stützen. Diese Stärke von OSM wird von Amazon für ihr Lieferrouting genutzt (so wie ich den Deal verstehe). Da wäre es unlogisch, andererseits die Qualität dieser Daten zu beeinträchtigen, indem Straßen von veralteten Luftbildern abgemalt oder Einbahnregelungen anhand undeutlicher Mapillarybilder „erraten“ werden (wie in der von Prince Kassad entdeckten falschen EBS in Hanau).
OSM-Priorität: Genaue Daten sind besser als ungefähre, ungefähre besser als keine, keine besser als falsche (oder veraltete oder geratene).
… und ich wollte noch in meinen ersten CS Kommentar schreiben “… and inform your colleagues …” aber das wäre sich eh’ für die Katz gewesen … @milet … wo ist mein Bier?
With their edits in the UK, I went through https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Amazon_Logistics#Current_Users and looked for problem features last edited by each one, and then added an appropriate changeset comment in each case. In my case it was simply a case of looking for “highway=track; motor_vehicle=yes”, in Germany it might not be as straightforward, but “most recent edits” by each one should still be helpful.
Ich habe die DWG um eine 0-Stunden-Sperrung für Amazon-Mapper gebeten, die so dumme [1] Änderungen machen. Ich habe den Änderungssatz gerade revertiert und warte auf den nächsten, der die Straßen wieder einträgt.
[1] Ich glaube, es mangelt denen an Grundlagenkenntnissen, die ich von jedem organisierten mehrere Tage aktiven Mapper erwarte: Satellitenbilder sind nie aktuell. Erst recht, wenn in OSM es ganz anders aussieht als auf dem Satellitenbild, muss man sich fragen, warum das so ist.
EDIT: Der Beitrag von SomeoneElse ist AFAIK eine Reaktion dieser Bitte.
Ich hatte parallel eine Mail an die ominöse OSM-EDIT Eskalations Adresse von amazon geschrieben und die DWG in cc: gesetzt … ich denke das könnte auch ein Auslöser für den Kommentar gewesen sein
I’ve taken the line that discussion with the OSM community should be where everyone in the OSM community can see it - places like changeset discussion comments, this forum, the German talk list, etc., rather than a conversation between one OSM mapper and one person within Amazon.
Die Presseabteilung hat sich bei mir gemeldet. In einem ausführlichen Telefonat habe ich die Grundlagen der der direkten öffentlichen Diskussion mit der Community dargelegt, auch anhand der Wiki-Seite von Mentz-DV als Beispiel für die Transparenz.
Es wird bei Amazon noch intern geklärt, dass die Mapping-Abteilung sich direkt hier im Forum beteiligt und die Organised Editing Guidelines beachtet werden. Erste Sofortmaßnahmen wurden bereits ergriffen, damit sich die geschilderten Negativ-Fälle nicht mehr wiederholen.
Beginning in the first week of July, our team at Amazon has edited missing roads in Germany which were detected based on our delivery partners’ GPS data. During this time, we have contributed a total of ~1600 changesets. Among these changesets we received seven comments from OSM community members requesting us to add missing gates or private information for newly added roads. We also received two additional comments from OSM community members for the roads added with reference to old satellite imagery in a coal mining area. We stopped our editing in the coal mining area promptly after receiving these comments. We responded to all the changeset comments within 24 hours, and any incorrect data was corrected immediately.
We have improved our processes for editing in Germany based on the feedback we received from OSM community members and have taken steps to avoid any incorrect edits in future. Going forward our team will:
Add only the high confidence missing road detections from driver GPS data
Verify underlying land-use classification before adding missing information
Will give importance to the recent edits in the vicinity and avoid data additions unless there is updated satellite imagery available
In case of doubtful edits we will start leaving notes, for the local community to improve it further
Access information will be added to roads only with a valid proof from street level imagery
We have been working with the OSM community since 2018 with the objective of improving the data quality of OSM. We look forward to continuing this work and the mutually beneficial relationship between Amazon and the OSM community at large.
Following are few of the examples where Amazon editors have improved the data quality:
In your second example, do you know that the oneway direction was wrong from local survey?
If not, the usual way is to get in touch with the previous editor via changeset comments and draw their attention to the impossible situation emerging. Maybe it was an error of them, but on the other hand, it might have been correct while another error caused the isolation.
I looked into the history of edits for that way where previously the oneway direction was accurately mapped with “oneway=-1” tag. Later the editor changed this tag to “oneway=yes” and forgot to change the way direction. I believe the editor made it by mistake, and also the changeset was huge to point to exact error location. So went ahead and fixed the way direction.
thanks for the summary.
Just to be clear - your above reply may be intended to lead to the conclusion, that only 7 required corrections out of those 1600 changesets may be a good ratio, but this would only be true - if all of those would have a confirmed local validation.
But this is something we should never assume - that a changeset without a local comment is a correct one (of course this is also true for all changes in OSM being done remotely).
Apart from that I see your process optimization points are a step into the right direction - but they should not be a one time effort.
Overall I think in this case commercial mapping puts a lot of additional effort on the shoulders of volunteers, while I am not yet convinced that the additional benefit outweighs the potential risks.
Thanks for your valuable comments. We are totally inclined to your points. With this post I wanted to emphasis the effort our team is putting in to improve the data in OSM. We made wrong edits in the past, but the team is learning quickly from our mistakes. We started to engage with the local community and learn from their suggestions. From the comments received in the past, we worked around and improved our mapping workflows as well.
We at Amazon are determined to contribute data back to OSM and our team is moving in the same foot steps. We are still new to editing in Germany, but from our limited interactions with local community we optimised our editing workflows to contribute back quality data. Please do continue to comment on our changesets if a wrong information is added. We will fix the issues within 24 hours and respond back to changesets.
It seems that these edits have been made to silence a quality management tool, which often leads to just hiding errors.
It takes a lot of time to investigate the edits of companies, which are done based on guessing/without local knowledge.
I strongly dislike such behaviour.
