Comment by jakobdabo
5 years ago
> What does that mean?
Most likely it is a direct translation from Russian by a non-native English speaker. I guess "curated" should have been "developed" or some other similar word.
5 years ago
> What does that mean?
Most likely it is a direct translation from Russian by a non-native English speaker. I guess "curated" should have been "developed" or some other similar word.
Unlikely, as there’s no Russian verb that directly corresponds to “curate”; the loanword курировать kurir|ovatʹ is (of course) etymologically related but refers to managing, mentoring, or otherwise overseeing people or organizations, not things, and the sense of using one’s judgment to choose and present a subset of a collection is instead usually expressed by a word (roughly) meaning “select, choose” that does not convey an implication of being in charge. Neither has much to do with the words for “code”, “program”, or “develop”.
(Source: native speaker.)
I’m somewhat surprised by the reaction here. Does “curating” a map really sound so wrong? One can curate libraries, museums, exhibitions, bibliographies, or other sorts of collections, so is sifting OSM data in order to get something presentable so different? I’d have said “lovingly curated” rather than “curated with love”, but that’s another matter.
They are balking simply because "curated" is a word that's become trendy for years in the tech/startup world and they are tired of hearing it.
I think it's rather about the amounts of data we're talking about. It's not practical to manually select OSM data for the world. An open source project of this size could maybe do it for a bigger city. But this is obviously not limited to a city.
So what does "curate" mean in that sentence?
I don’t rightly know what it means. Probably what you’d guess it does: a big ol’ pile of good-enough heuristic filters and transformations tuned on a handful of key locations, with a pinch of manual modification.
I was only surprised at the claim that the sentence doesn’t make sense in English, I never intended to imply that the sense wasn’t bullshit. (After the sellout stunt the MAPS.ME creators pulled I generally don’t view their participation as an advantage.)
OSM includes practically any mappable data collected for free, including even Wikipedia entries with a physical location. I assume curating means deciding the relevance of stuff like this and making into a map thats similar to google maps. Curate has also lost a lot of its meaning after ~5 years of ad spam. "This holiday, Lexus presents a curated grifting experience" (leaving in the autocorrect typo, sorry)
There's nothing wrong with the English word "curated". I think pp is being a little punctilious. The writer just means that they aren't giving you a random data dump, they've engaged in some activity analogous to e.g. the curator of a museum, to select which data is worth showing. Pp is asking "does this mean that they have made a specific decision about all the data that is shown?" when I think it means they've probably tweaked parameters to show information they find useful given various densities and contexts.
How good their curation is remains to be seen of course.
Yes that is what I thought. They have developed a style, icons, colour scheme etc for the app. To show you the data in a visually pleasing for that they think is good.