Re: [Talk-us] Fresno castradal imports
Because that information is useless in OSM. It was out of date the second someone ran the upload script and unless the city of Fresno decides to switch to OSM for their official tax plat information (which I'm pretty sure would be illegal in most jurisdictions), no one in the community can improve it. We should get rid of it. Excuse me, but what is your foundation for declaring cadastral data useless in OSM? Where does it say that OSM is just for roads, addresses, and geocoding? As someone that uses OSM for disaster response, cadastral data, even outdated cadastral data, is a godsend when it is available. Cadastral is the foundation to developing damage assessments; often the only usable source for damage assessment in the US. It is far, far more easily than roads in this context; and were Fresno to be hit by an earthquake next week, it would be a PR disaster to find out that the critical cadastral data was available in OSM, and is now wiped away. This data even has the parcel ID, the most critical piece of information that often is excluded from cadastral sets. That keys you into everything else you might want: address, land value, building value, FIRM map, etc. I do not understand this constant desire to handicap the usefulness of OSM. --Brett Brett Lord-Castillo Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer St. Louis County Police Office of Emergency Management ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Fresno castradal imports
OSM is not a giant collection bowl for data (oh look I've found a scrap of data on my city's web site, let's upload that to OSM so that it don't get lost!!!). OSM is a giant *editor*. OSM is for *editing* data. I strongly disagree. OSM is for the user, not for the editor. OSM -is- a giant collection bowl for data. It exists to allow access to data that might otherwise be inaccessible. Crowdsourcing is the means, not the ends. Anything that is surveyed and that can be updated by normal citizens can benefit from being in OSM; where people survey such data and put it in into OSM, they open the data up for the helping hands of others. The very foundation of cadastral data is ground survey. I know from experience that most GIS cadastral data is obtained by heads up digitizing, not from original documents. It is actually an ideal area for crowdsourcing. Interested users can access original documents and reconstruct the boundaries correctly and at much greater accuracy than the cities. (Incidentally, normally there is no authoritative source for GIS cadastral data in the US, and where there is an authoritative source, it is not the cities but rather the counties. What the city of Fresno provides is no more authoritative than anything drawn by an OSM user using recorded deeds.) --Brett Brett Lord-Castillo Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer St. Louis County Police Office of Emergency Management ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Fresno castradal imports
Because the nature of cadastral data is that there is a data owner and it is very rarely OSM. That data owner has created the data out of thin air. There's absolutely no correlation between something on the ground and the information in the dataset. OSM is built upon the fact that anyone can download the data and verify or improve it using a potentially better data source than the original mapper. Cadastral data will *never ever* get better with more people looking at it, because the only entity that can change that data is the original data source. I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of cadastral data versus tax records. Cadastral records are directly correlated to ground surveys tied to ground monuments. The gis data should be reconstructed from the recorded descriptions of the boundaries, though in the United States that is rarely the case. It is very easy for an average user to verify or improve a cadastral boundary using these recorded documents and easily surpass the original data source. The original entity rarely, if ever, claims authority on those boundaries and often times performs updates only once or twice per decade, if that It is, in fact, a far better suited task to crowdsourcing than roads. Roads in the US are far more likely to have authoritative sources than parcel line work. Roads rarely, if ever, have written descriptions that can be used for precise construction; instead we rely on often highly inaccurate heads up digitization as the sole source. Yet, the improvement of road information through digitization is considered a central task of OSM. If digitization of roads is acceptable, when superior ground survey is readily available, then coordinate construction of and improvement of parcels from ground survey has to be an acceptable task. --Brett Brett Lord-Castillo Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer St. Louis County Police Office of Emergency Management ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] NHD import
Most recent USGS topos show that area as water features. NAIP 2012 shows water there; looks like wetlands restoration maybe? --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 ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Addition of building footprints in selected
I think imports (taking a large number of objects from an external source and placing them in OSM all at once) is bad for the community. Most of you have heard me say this before. I still have no hard evidence to prove it. There is also no hard counter-evidence. At best, imported data will be unmaintained. I glibly offer most TIGER ways as evidence. I ask you to suspend disbelief for a moment, and presume that imports are generally bad, and presume that adding new mappers is generally good. While imports are bad for mappers, disallowing imports is also bad for users. We had initially had a lot of enthusiasm for OSM and were planning to integrate it into our editing workflows and applications. When imports from our editing workflow were rejected, we pretty much gave up. Our cartographer group hand edits just as much as a volunteer mapper, including fieldwork, official documents, lidar, and aerial photography in their workflow. We even have terabytes of GPS traces from our patrol vehicles. When their contributions were disallowed, we were essentially cut off from making any corrections to data that we knew was wrong. That greatly decreased the value of OSM for us, and we stopped plans to use OSM for new web applications. Obviously we completely halted plans to integrate it into our editing workflows. So yes, this strategy encourages new mappers, but having to stare at bad data without being able to touch it also discourages us as a new user. I suspect we are not the only group discouraged in this way. 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 ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
