> Imports are quite the pain to try and do - there's a whole process in place > now to do them. It stems from the experience in the States of an import more > than a decade ago of the TIGER data (from the Census Bureau) that is still > being fixed after pretty large amounts of time working through it.
Major components of the USA's TIGER import included both road (highway=*) and rail (railway=*). This took place in 2007-8 with early-to-mid-2000s data and resulted in OSM data which were (and still are in places) quite problematic. There have been many strategies and even renderers which aim to address helping fix the massive amount of TIGER data that were imported, yet it will likely take another decade (three?) to complete these improvements — that's a lot of work. This sort of "ongoing work to improve an import" is common with earlier / older imports (especially when OSM had little to no "official" guidelines to doing imports well). Our Import Guidelines go a long way towards remedying common problems associated with imports from "lessons learned" in earlier ones, but imports are still both controversial and often problematic. However, there are excellent examples of well done imports, usually with very carefully written Import Guidelines, a good deal of community buy-in and consensus and often the guidance of OSM volunteers who have experience with imports and can steer the process in better directions if they begin to go awry. I don't need to say it, but Kevin is correct: let TIGER be a lesson to OSM about imports, especially those done at very wide (national) scales in large geographic areas like Canada or USA. They are challenging to do well, but shouldn't be completely prohibited, but rather done quite carefully and slowly. SteveA California _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
