> 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
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