Hi all, Today I have encountered a lot of bad data in my area - duplicated nodes/ways. These probably stem from an inexperienced user or faulty editor software when drawing building. I corrected a lot of this stuff, see changesets:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/12208202 http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/12208389 http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/12208467 http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/12208498 As you can see, these changesets remove thousands of nodes/ways. I have done this using JOSM validators and "Fix it" option which automatically merges/deletes nodes that are duplicated. That is all fine of course but this sparked a thought... why is this garbage data like this allowed into the database in the first place? Of course it can always be fixed client-side (JOSM, even some autobots) but why allow an unconnected untagged nodes or duplicated nodes, duplicated ways etc.? I understand (though don't wholly agree...) the concept of having a very generic data model where anyone can push anything into the database but it would be trivial to implement some server-side validations for these cases (so that API throws errors and does not accept such data) and thus reduce client-side work by a very significant margin - i.e. I could have been working on something more useful in that time than removing garbage data. Server-side validation could be of course taken even further - OSM server could reject meaningless tag combinations etc. - basically JOSM validators on the "error" level should be implemented as server-side validators, some "warning" level validators possibly as well. This would ensure data consistency and integrity at least a little bit... (of course first bad data would have to be pruned from existing database so that it is consistent with validation logic but that's for another discussion). What is the current consensus within OSM dev community on this aspect of OSM architecture? Paweł _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
