OpenStreetMap
Have you ever taken a look at your own mapping done over a year or two ago? If you haven’t yet done that, take a few minutes and check out some old projects or areas you have mapped. A few questions you might ask yourself upon a glance at your own mapping would be; Did I really map these features?; What happened to my mapping skills?; How could this happen? Of course! that is you.
But you should rest assured that is not your doing. I came across an area mapped by an experienced mapper who was and has been my inspiration since I joined the OSM community and at the first glance I was disappointed. But upon checking the history of the mapped features, I realized the digitization was done years back.
This realization brought back theories I learned in class during my undergraduate studies. “Maps do not stand the test of time”, meaning they are easily outdated. But this is true when it comes to paper maps since it takes a lot of money and effort to make them and yet they do not last in terms of representing newer environmental development.
Its a different story for OSM, yes area never gets mapped, but we can constantly keep updating data to catch up with the ever-evolving and ever-changing environment so that the world does not classify OSM data are not good enough. Let’s Keep Mapping Daily, The Work Never Ends!
Discussion
Comment from DeBigC on 9 January 2023 at 07:31
Interesting, well maybe look at it this way. In big organised pushes for mapping a particular theme like all roads or all buildings those mappers can say the area is mapped (in the strict context of doing their task). They aren’t wrong in that context, but of course more can be mapped.
Indeed every map is out of date, as would be the case with anything that tries to represent reality. If you accept that maps are representations then this isn’t a problem. There is no omnipresent force, or canonical reality possible in a map, however, electronic maps are miles more useful to end users, than paper ones. All the same we all work with 1-3 year old, often badly rectified Bing, Maxar and ESRI so, without loads of regular surveying and GPS capture this will always be a limitation somewhere.
Thanks for your diary post though.