Friday 11 February 2011

Sympathy

I like the tools that encourage people to get out and look at their surroundings. Some might call it surveying, but often it's just an extra to some other journey or visit. Sadly some people don't get out and look what's there, they just use the tools to blithely add data to the OSM database regardless of how up-to-date it is or how valid it is.

Today we wandered around part of the East Riding looking for names where OSM and OS Locator don't agree. The rain had stopped but the promised brightness didn't appear. I found a new housing development with a few houses on it developed since our last visit (one of the best uses of the OS Locator dataset). We found a couple of roads OS Locator has names for where we couldn't see a name and a few roads where the OS Locator data was wrong. Coppleflat Lane seems to be everywhere and actually it is nowhere. I think the OS surveyor (or whoever they got their data from) must have had a bad day.

I toyed with venturing down a named, very muddy track that we didn't have a trace for and decided that a trace from Bing, well aligned with our GPS track would do. The Bing photos are a bit old, but I estimate the track is hundreds of years old so they will do nicely.

One name I didn't know was Bluestone Bottoms. I can feel some sympathy with the road - this hard chair that I'm on now leaves me feeling a bit like that sometimes.

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