At least one benefit of import that I see is people tagging my imported data with "wikipedia" tags... one can highlight osm-object in Wikipedia with WIWOSM like this...
2012/7/30 Jaak Laineste <[email protected]>: > > On 30.07.2012, at 10:54, Jan Kučera wrote: > >> Hello again, >> >> 2012/7/29 Frederik Ramm <[email protected]>: >>> Hi, >>> >>> Only if these areas are verifiable and editable by mappers should they >>> be in OSM! >> >> I understand core of this point. These are "artificial" boundaries >> (with a physical "sign" placed sometimes in the field - varies greatly >> country by country I can imagine, but is nothing useful for mapping) >> but as Mikel says currently such areas are present in OSM and there >> are no "official" restrictions for mapping these known to me so far... >> Surely these areas will not change a lot in the future, so the >> advantage of having them in OSM is just using one single >> platform/database with single API as for other OSM-objects... like >> this we could surely delete all national borders etc... would not make >> a lot of sence either. >> >> I understand the possibility od having a standalone data just for >> rendering though... is there a common practice how to include these >> into main osm-mapnik layer (= without having these in main database)? > > Right, this is data is nice for rendering, and is quite useless for the OSM, > i.e. community editing. Rendering by whom? If you build your own renderer, > you can add all this kind of datasets to it; the question is from where to > find the data (discovery issue). If you use the mapnik, then the data should > be somewhere in OSM servers. > > Technical proposal: what about setting up a shared GIS server somewhere next > to Mapnik renderer, so it would provide both usable CMS and hosting for this > kind of datasets? So community can upload their shapefiles with metadata > there, Mapnik can use them and other community renderers can download and use > them too if they need to. Technically there are already some shapefile-based > datasets in mapnik renderer (coastlines hosted in SVN); what is missing is a > scalable interface to add other external datasets. > > There are several opensource GIS server packages which could be good fit, > Geoserver seems to be closest to me. Sure, it has a lot of GIS stuff we don't > really need right away, and may miss some features, but it seems to have good > base to get started with it. > > It does not solve the question whether to import specific data to OSM or > not. I have one experience with administrative boundaries: many of the > borders were going along rivers; and as this data was more accurate in OSM > already then I ended up with more accurate administrative data in OSM than it > was in the official shapefile. With separate shapefiles you would not get > this effect. But still I think that this benefit was quite marginal one, and > this kind of data should be kept separate. > > Jaak > > _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
