It is not an example of a use case per se, but last summer I spoke to several of the GIS and similar departments in my city regarding OSM. Among the people I spoke with was one from the city forestry department (which looks after trees along roads) and one person from the parks department (which looks after trees in parks). Each department had their own database of trees and from what I could tell they didn't share the data between them (which seems like an obvious problem to me). I tried to show them the benefits of putting both databases into OSM and using that as a common sharing platform to study disease propagation among trees and whatnot. Our city is currently under threat from an invasive species (the emerald ash borer) and having the data split like that risks missing "danger areas" where the ash tree density is high but half are park trees and half are street trees.
Finally, they didn't have data for trees in people's yards and on other private property unless they were trees along the street that the city maintained, so their database was pretty incomplete in that regard as well. I did learn an awful lot from them about what kind of data they collect on the trees and it blew my mind. They must have 50 columns in their shapefile for all the properties they collect about the trees they maintain (i.e. 50 tags per tree if we had the data in OSM), and they had this data on something like 60,000 trees! All in all they have amazing data and showed some interest in the idea of a unified database but I think it would take some more work to finally put them over the edge. Anyway, hope this info is useful to you, even if it is not exactly what you are looking for. -AndrewBuck
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