Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Alan Mintz
At 2010-04-23 21:07, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
>what is BAS? any better source will be useful

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/bas/bashome.html

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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Alan Mintz
At 2010-04-22 13:09, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
 >On 22 April 2010 04:24, Alan Mintz  wrote:
 >> At 2010-04-21 17:12, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
 >>>On 22 April 2010 01:18, Apollinaris Schoell  wrote:
 >>> > On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:36 PM, andrzej zaborowski 
 >>> > wrote:
 >>> >> Where's damage in that -- is it in that you can now read the name out
 >>> >> without checking the documentation for what that funny string means in
 >>> >> that particular database that is TIGER?
 >>
 >> I just had a machine crash as I was trying to find stats, but I'll bet that
 >> at least 90% of the cases are "St", "Ave"/"Av", and "Blvd"/"Bl", with the
 >> occasional "Ln" and "Cir"/"Cr" thrown in. When there's a lone N, S, E, or W
 >> as a prefix to a street name, it's clear to everyone what that means. These
 >> are the same abbreviations that _everyone_ uses every day - children,
 >> adults, businesses, governments, etc.
 >
 >Well, you just gave examples of the obvious ones, I'm not claiming any of 
these are not known.  But the list has 672 different forms.

My point, though, was that we were going to a lot of trouble for a small 
percentage of real-world cases that _might_ (see below) present a problem 
for someone to understand.


 >(but even the easy ones are hard for non-human consumers because St has 
at least three possible meanings, all three quite popular across the db).

I'm sorry, but as a suffix (i.e. for the regex / St$/), what else does St 
mean but Street?


 >> And I will do so again. My problem is mostly that this was done without a
 >> safety net. You clobbered existing data with no easy way to "walk it 
back"...
 >
 >Well, the way to "walk it back" is pretty easy, all the names can be 
taken from version-1 or reassembled from the tiger tags, so no worries there.

This doesn't work for streets that were edited by users. Again, my problem 
is that, in thousands of edits, I specifically only expanded, for example, 
the prefix "N" to "North" when it is logically part of the root name. When 
it is logically a housenumber suffix, as it is in the majority of southern 
CA, I left the prefix alone. The road name may have been otherwise edited, 
though (to correct spelling, rename completely, etc.) This was to be used 
in the future when we could agree on a way to correctly separate these 
component parts of the name, as they are and must be in any database to be 
used with routing and street addressing in the real world. To "walk it 
back", we will have to query the history of the way and find the version 
before the bot, to see what was done. It's not just v1, or TIGER, because 
it may have been otherwise edited. It's not even v[last-1] any more because 
there may have been other edits since the bot (I've done many myself).


 >>>...Then TIGER also includes Spanish names and the
 >>>list has abbreviations for those too, which rarely anyone in US can
 >>>read, while they can cope with unabbreviated ok.
 >>
 >> I don't agree. Much of the US speaks Spanish. Many more possess the
 >> tremendous brainpower and enoUGH grade-school Spanish required to know that
 >> Cl. in front of a street name might mean Calle or Cam. might mean Camino,
 >> or that S means Sur and N means Norte.
 >
 >But do you remember the 600 abbreviations used in tiger?  It's neither 
practical or useful or helps anyone, they're much like numerical 
codes.  The one single thing they may be good for is for rendering at lower 
zoom levels.

I don't understand. Why do I have to remember them? Am I not capable of 
inferring their meaning? Do I have to infer anything anyway, since they are 
likely to be similar/identical to signage? Also, to me "lower zoom levels" 
is almost any level at which I want to see a map. Anything more than a 
small neighborhood, and it's all we can do just to fit the root of the name 
in - we don't need any _more_ characters.


 >> name: The pre-balrog name
 >
 >99% percent of the cases this was an arbitrary version of name, taken 
from a database which was chosen only on the basis of its license, not 
because it was more correct or anything.  So I don't see any reason to hang 
on to it.

If I understand you correctly, I disagree completely. In my experience in 
southern CA, >90% of the time, TIGER is correct with the exception of the 
presence of the directional prefix. The real problem was the geometry[1].


 >> In the Los Angeles area, I rarely saw expanded names (which is why I
 >> continue to abbreviate), except for those rare instances where someone drew
 >> a street from scratch before TIGER (apparently), and not even all of those.

BTW, from my previously cited data chunk (35988 unique names in about 4400 
sq mi (11000 sq km) of southern CA) , I can now say that only ~0.2% of 
suffixes were present in their expanded form (i.e. Street, Avenue, etc.).


 >>>You could surely change the wiki but it's a conclusion that a lot of
 >>>people individually seem to come to so I'm sure you wouldn't even need
 >>>a bot before someone

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Apollinaris Schoell

On 23 Apr 2010, at 19:46 , Alan Mintz wrote:

> At 2010-04-23 07:47, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
> 
> I don't know about "completely". The parts of the Kern/LA/Orange/San 
> Bernardino/Riverside/San Diego borders that I have surveyed are at least 
> close to the signage at important points (admittedly a weak standard), but 
> I've also gone hunting for detail in law in some spots and found that the 
> borders were right as of their date of creation in the source data. I 
> remember manually fixing a little bit of the OC/LA border in La Habra from 
> some sort of change description - maybe something out the BAS project. What 
> a pain that was.
> 

depends on the definition, for me a difference of 100-200m is too bad. any GPS 
or verbal description is better if matched with Yahoo. In some corners even 
worse complex edges have been entirely clipped.
USGS is pretty good and matches county borders. County borders are from 
official state data and are high accuracy. Also Sat matches well when borders 
follow natural features.
USGS tracing is very difficult because borders are often hard to identify among 
other features.


> Is anyone working on borders currently? Is the BAS a reasonable source?

what is BAS? any better source will be useful

> 
> --
> Alan Mintz 
> 
> 
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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Alan Mintz
At 2010-04-22 13:33, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
 >On 22 April 2010 17:40, Apollinaris Schoell  wrote:
 >> On 21 Apr 2010, at 17:12 , andrzej zaborowski wrote:
 >>> The signs are posted there by authorities so this is similar to having
 >>> access to a tiny piece of a map or database made by these authorities.
 >>> For maps people usually agreed on this list that we don't trust them.
 >>>
 >>
 >> are you saying authorities are wrong and we should correct what they 
are doing and follow tiger or USPS standards instead?
 >
 >I'm saying we should name the objects what they're called, not what it is 
written as in somebody's database.

"what they're called", though, may indeed be from "somebody's database", 
when that database is the county recorder's or assessor's. The recorder, in 
particular, should be the truth by definition, except when you can see that 
there's an obvious mistake and can confirm it with them.

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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Alan Mintz
At 2010-04-23 07:47, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
> > While I understand the mantra of TIGER=Bad because of the state of the 
> road data, this is not true for the boundary data. Most of the boundary 
> data comes directly from recorded surveys (something not available for 
> roads) and is not "bad data" for most of the United States. The rural 
> areas would be the one exception (mostly because they did not have 
> surveys converted to digital layers in 2000), but rural areas are also 
> highly likely to have realigned boundary roads that no longer correspond 
> to the original boundaries.
> >
>
>I can tell for sure that they are completely wrong in California. They are 
>not even close to USGS 24k, don't align with official county borders from 
>official sources and don't align with natural features, fences which are 
>sometimes visible on Yahoo.

I don't know about "completely". The parts of the Kern/LA/Orange/San 
Bernardino/Riverside/San Diego borders that I have surveyed are at least 
close to the signage at important points (admittedly a weak standard), but 
I've also gone hunting for detail in law in some spots and found that the 
borders were right as of their date of creation in the source data. I 
remember manually fixing a little bit of the OC/LA border in La Habra from 
some sort of change description - maybe something out the BAS project. What 
a pain that was.

Is anyone working on borders currently? Is the BAS a reasonable source?

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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Alan Mintz

At 2010-04-23 18:11, Anthony
wrote:

A navi system is more useful if the instructions and signs
match.


Depends on your purpose.  If you're trying to navigate to the
missigned street (e.g. "California Street", where the sign
reads "Carolina Street"), you don't want to get a response of
"street not found".  For most other purposes you'd rather
have the incorrect name (at least until it gets 
fixed).
Yeah - this is always a quandary. In my experience, the street sign
usually ends up being "right" anyway, so I'm usually asking the
responsible authority to fix their GIS and/or the source map (yes, even
tract maps that are decades old :) ). I don't really consider this as
"original research", since it's really a matter of reconciling
sources, but it's admittedly time consuming and requires additional
research that many mappers (understandably) may not want to do. Still, I
think it's value that I can add, not only to OSM, but also for my fellow
citizens.
When the sign is wrong, I notify the signing authority and, if it seems
that they intend to fix it soon (the usual case), I put the correct value
in the name tag and the signed value in the alt_name tag, with a note tag
describing the situation. If there is no easy contact with the authority,
or it seems they may not fix it soon, I reverse the tagging. Either way,
there are notes/FIXMEs there to remind me (or others) to survey again in
the future.
BTW, technically, I would call surveying/photographing, and then mapping
based on it, original research :)
P.S.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/56123368
is one of those strange cases where it's been signed and likely known "wrong" according to the cited docs, because the signed name is more logical in context. I name'd it as signed and put the recorded name in the official_name tag instead. If there's anyone nearby that would like to have a look, It'd be useful to know how it's signed at the intersection with Outer Traffic Circle here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/122696036 .

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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Anthony
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Brad Neuhauser
wrote:

> The bigger issue with it being
> imported into OSM is the currency, because municipal boundaries are
> always changing, and as has been mentioned, boundaries are not usually
> something that is easily verifiable "on the ground"
>

I'd say the biggest issue is the fact that, when the census bureau couldn't
find data on municipalities, they decided to just "make shit up".  They
picked some arbitrary boundary which had roughly the right number of people
in it, and then named it after an actual place which happened to be nearby.

The CDPs are horrible when used for any purpose other than interpreting
census data.  I really wish the census bureau had named them "CDP 1283",
"CDP 1284", "CDP 1285", etc.
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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Anthony
On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Lord-Castillo, Brett <
blord-casti...@stlouisco.com> wrote:

> While I understand the mantra of TIGER=Bad because of the state of the road
> data, this is not true for the boundary data.


I assume you're talking about the county/state boundaries, which I can't
vouch for one way or the other.  The CDPs are mostly horrible.  They should
have never been added, and now that they have been added they should be
removed.
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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Anthony
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 10:24 PM, Alan Mintz

> wrote:

> "map what's on the ground" is the wrong thing to do so often that I don't
> really understand why it was decided upon, nor why people continue hold it
> up on a pedestal, despite continuing problems with it.
>

It's the OSM equivalent of Wikipedia's "no original research" policy.  It
often gets in the way, and sometimes just has to be ignored, but for a
massively collaborative project like OSM it's hard to see how you can do
without it.

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:

> there is a reason for "map what is on the ground" this is the only thing we
> can verify.
>

The term "map what's on the ground" is almost always used in a way which is
more restrictive than "map what can be verified".  There are plenty of
things which can be verified by looking through the legal code or official
records, but don't constitute "what's on the ground".

The main problem with allowing people to input such information is that it's
easily misinterpreted by the average OSM contributor.  This is why I see it
as analogous to Wikipedia's "no original research".  In a perfect world, we
wouldn't need it.  But in a real world massively collaborative project,
unless you're going to have some sort of hierarchy or voting system or
something, it often proves to be necessary.

A navi system is more useful if the instructions and signs match.
>

Depends on your purpose.  If you're trying to navigate to the missigned
street (e.g. "California Street", where the sign reads "Carolina Street"),
you don't want to get a response of "street not found".  For most other
purposes you'd rather have the incorrect name (at least until it gets
fixed).
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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Brad Neuhauser
I'd agree with Brett on the boundaries.  The Census data is not
perfect by any means, but it's pretty good, at least in my
area--Minnesota.  (and orders of magnitude better than it was in
2000!)  And if it's not good in your area, you should talk to your
local government and make sure they're participating in the Census'
yearly Boundary & Annexation Survey.
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/bas/bashome.html

>I can tell for sure that they are completely wrong in California. They are not 
>even close to USGS 24k, don't align with official county borders from official 
>sources and don't align with natural features, fences which are sometimes 
>visible on Yahoo.

To further respond to this, there is no claim by the Census that it's
survey accuracy, or that it aligns with other data.  Fundamentally, it
is created by the Census for internal purposes, and all TIGER boundary
data is relative to the other TIGER data. (just like a lot of traced
OSM data is relative to the Yahoo imagery)  Everybody gets access to
it for free and you can use it when its good or ignore it when its bad
or modify it when its in between.  The bigger issue with it being
imported into OSM is the currency, because municipal boundaries are
always changing, and as has been mentioned, boundaries are not usually
something that is easily verifiable "on the ground"

Cheers,
Brad

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 9:54 AM, Lord-Castillo, Brett
 wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Apollinaris Schoell [mailto:ascho...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Friday, April 23, 2010 9:47 AM
> To: Lord-Castillo, Brett
> Cc: 'talk-us@openstreetmap.org'
> Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads
>
>
> On 23 Apr 2010, at 7:13 , Lord-Castillo, Brett wrote:
>
>>> On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:24, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
 On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:07 , Alan Mintz wrote:
> Not to mention that merging them will result in the inability to hide 
> these
> boundaries. When doing a bunch of editing on a road that follows one, in
> the past, I've taken the time to verify that the boundary doesn't share 
> any
> nodes with anything and then remove it from my local OSM file manually so 
> I
> don't have to constantly deal with it. If it shares nodes with anything
> else, this is no longer possible.
>>>
 fully agree, the good thing is these boundaries are tiger data and bad 
 data anyway and should be replaced with better boundaries
>>>
>>> While I understand the mantra of TIGER=Bad because of the state of the road 
>>> data, this is not true for the boundary data. Most of the
>>> boundary data comes directly from recorded surveys (something not available 
>>> for roads) and is not "bad data" for most of the United
>>> States. The rural areas would be the one exception (mostly because they did 
>>> not have surveys converted to digital layers in 2000), but
>>>  rural areas are also highly likely to have realigned boundary roads that 
>>> no longer correspond to the original boundaries.
>>>
>> I can tell for sure that they are completely wrong in California. They are 
>> not even close to USGS 24k, don't align with official county
>> borders from official sources and don't align with natural features, fences 
>> which are sometimes visible on Yahoo.
>
>
> Yes, California is one of the well-known exceptions. Their LUCA program fell 
> apart (and this time around has been split into two separate regions as a 
> result). If you take the Midwest states though, like Iowa, Minnesota, 
> Missouri with their 300+ counties between them, the TIGER lines are directly 
> from official sources, especially the 2009 updates.
>
> Brett Lord-Castillo
> Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
> St. Louis County Police
> Office of Emergency Management
> 14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive
> Chesterfield, MO 63017
> Office: 314-628-5400 Fax: 314-628-5508 Direct: 314-628-5407
>
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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Lord-Castillo, Brett






-Original Message-
From: Apollinaris Schoell [mailto:ascho...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 23, 2010 9:47 AM
To: Lord-Castillo, Brett
Cc: 'talk-us@openstreetmap.org'
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads


On 23 Apr 2010, at 7:13 , Lord-Castillo, Brett wrote:

>> On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:24, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
>>> On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:07 , Alan Mintz wrote:
 Not to mention that merging them will result in the inability to hide 
 these 
 boundaries. When doing a bunch of editing on a road that follows one, in 
 the past, I've taken the time to verify that the boundary doesn't share 
 any 
 nodes with anything and then remove it from my local OSM file manually so 
 I 
 don't have to constantly deal with it. If it shares nodes with anything 
 else, this is no longer possible.
>> 
>>> fully agree, the good thing is these boundaries are tiger data and bad data 
>>> anyway and should be replaced with better boundaries
>> 
>> While I understand the mantra of TIGER=Bad because of the state of the road 
>> data, this is not true for the boundary data. Most of the
>> boundary data comes directly from recorded surveys (something not available 
>> for roads) and is not "bad data" for most of the United
>> States. The rural areas would be the one exception (mostly because they did 
>> not have surveys converted to digital layers in 2000), but
>>  rural areas are also highly likely to have realigned boundary roads that no 
>> longer correspond to the original boundaries.
>> 
> I can tell for sure that they are completely wrong in California. They are 
> not even close to USGS 24k, don't align with official county
> borders from official sources and don't align with natural features, fences 
> which are sometimes visible on Yahoo. 


Yes, California is one of the well-known exceptions. Their LUCA program fell 
apart (and this time around has been split into two separate regions as a 
result). If you take the Midwest states though, like Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri 
with their 300+ counties between them, the TIGER lines are directly from 
official sources, especially the 2009 updates.

Brett Lord-Castillo
Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
St. Louis County Police
Office of Emergency Management
14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive
Chesterfield, MO 63017
Office: 314-628-5400 Fax: 314-628-5508 Direct: 314-628-5407

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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Apollinaris Schoell

On 23 Apr 2010, at 7:13 , Lord-Castillo, Brett wrote:

> On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:24, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
>> On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:07 , Alan Mintz wrote:
>>> Not to mention that merging them will result in the inability to hide these 
>>> boundaries. When doing a bunch of editing on a road that follows one, in 
>>> the past, I've taken the time to verify that the boundary doesn't share any 
>>> nodes with anything and then remove it from my local OSM file manually so I 
>>> don't have to constantly deal with it. If it shares nodes with anything 
>>> else, this is no longer possible.
> 
>> fully agree, the good thing is these boundaries are tiger data and bad data 
>> anyway and should be replaced with better boundaries
> 
> While I understand the mantra of TIGER=Bad because of the state of the road 
> data, this is not true for the boundary data. Most of the boundary data comes 
> directly from recorded surveys (something not available for roads) and is not 
> "bad data" for most of the United States. The rural areas would be the one 
> exception (mostly because they did not have surveys converted to digital 
> layers in 2000), but rural areas are also highly likely to have realigned 
> boundary roads that no longer correspond to the original boundaries.
> 

I can tell for sure that they are completely wrong in California. They are not 
even close to USGS 24k, don't align with official county borders from official 
sources and don't align with natural features, fences which are sometimes 
visible on Yahoo. 


> --Brett
> Brett Lord-Castillo
> Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
> St. Louis County Police
> Office of Emergency Management
> 14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive
> Chesterfield, MO 63017
> Office: 314-628-5400
> Fax: 314-628-5508
> Direct: 314-628-5407
> 
> 
> 
> -Original Message-
> Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:24:47 -0700
> From: Apollinaris Schoell 
> Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads
> To: Alan Mintz 
> Cc: talk-us@openstreetmap.org
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> 
> On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:07 , Alan Mintz wrote:
> 
>> At 2010-04-19 10:45, Mike N. wrote:
>>> I see that the separate VS tangled argument has been settled in the US by
>>> the "Duplicate Node attack bots", who have blindly merged all duplicate
>>> nodes.
>>> 
>>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/38855677
>> 
>> Is this really happening? Can someone describe exactly what criteria are 
>> being used, and just how it was decided that this was a good idea? Seems 
>> like the wrong thing to do - city and county boundaries are often defined 
>> in law, or by survey, and do not necessarily keep up with changes in road 
>> alignment. I have resisted editing most of these boundaries until/unless I 
>> take the time to research the true definition of the boundary.
>> 
>> Not to mention that merging them will result in the inability to hide these 
>> boundaries. When doing a bunch of editing on a road that follows one, in 
>> the past, I've taken the time to verify that the boundary doesn't share any 
>> nodes with anything and then remove it from my local OSM file manually so I 
>> don't have to constantly deal with it. If it shares nodes with anything 
>> else, this is no longer possible.
> 
> fully agree, the good thing is these boundaries are tiger data and bad data 
> anyway and should be replaced with better boundaries
>> 
>> Sounds a lot like the IMO ill-considered road name expansion that was 
>> apparently agreed upon by a small group of people without input from the 
>> majority of active mappers whose work has been damaged.
> 
> agreed, no idea why this was done. it's a change without much benefit but 
> lot's of damage. 
> 
>> 
>> --
>> Alan Mintz 
> 
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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

2010-04-23 Thread Lord-Castillo, Brett
On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:24, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
>On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:07 , Alan Mintz wrote:
>> Not to mention that merging them will result in the inability to hide these 
>> boundaries. When doing a bunch of editing on a road that follows one, in 
>> the past, I've taken the time to verify that the boundary doesn't share any 
>> nodes with anything and then remove it from my local OSM file manually so I 
>> don't have to constantly deal with it. If it shares nodes with anything 
>> else, this is no longer possible.

> fully agree, the good thing is these boundaries are tiger data and bad data 
> anyway and should be replaced with better boundaries

While I understand the mantra of TIGER=Bad because of the state of the road 
data, this is not true for the boundary data. Most of the boundary data comes 
directly from recorded surveys (something not available for roads) and is not 
"bad data" for most of the United States. The rural areas would be the one 
exception (mostly because they did not have surveys converted to digital layers 
in 2000), but rural areas are also highly likely to have realigned boundary 
roads that no longer correspond to the original boundaries.

--Brett
Brett Lord-Castillo
Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
St. Louis County Police
Office of Emergency Management
14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive
Chesterfield, MO 63017
Office: 314-628-5400
Fax: 314-628-5508
Direct: 314-628-5407



-Original Message-
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:24:47 -0700
From: Apollinaris Schoell 
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads
To: Alan Mintz 
Cc: talk-us@openstreetmap.org
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii


On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:07 , Alan Mintz wrote:

> At 2010-04-19 10:45, Mike N. wrote:
>>  I see that the separate VS tangled argument has been settled in the US by
>> the "Duplicate Node attack bots", who have blindly merged all duplicate
>> nodes.
>> 
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/38855677
> 
> Is this really happening? Can someone describe exactly what criteria are 
> being used, and just how it was decided that this was a good idea? Seems 
> like the wrong thing to do - city and county boundaries are often defined 
> in law, or by survey, and do not necessarily keep up with changes in road 
> alignment. I have resisted editing most of these boundaries until/unless I 
> take the time to research the true definition of the boundary.
> 
> Not to mention that merging them will result in the inability to hide these 
> boundaries. When doing a bunch of editing on a road that follows one, in 
> the past, I've taken the time to verify that the boundary doesn't share any 
> nodes with anything and then remove it from my local OSM file manually so I 
> don't have to constantly deal with it. If it shares nodes with anything 
> else, this is no longer possible.

fully agree, the good thing is these boundaries are tiger data and bad data 
anyway and should be replaced with better boundaries
> 
> Sounds a lot like the IMO ill-considered road name expansion that was 
> apparently agreed upon by a small group of people without input from the 
> majority of active mappers whose work has been damaged.

agreed, no idea why this was done. it's a change without much benefit but lot's 
of damage. 

> 
> --
> Alan Mintz 

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