On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Brett Lord-Casitllo <marigol...@yahoo.com>wrote:
> "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 It was out of date the second 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? > 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. Frederik likes to complain about imports because once they get imported it gets stale and won't get tended to by the community. For this sort of data I completely agree: the data is complete noise and will never be improved upon. > 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 someone that uses OSM for disaster response, cadastral data, even outdated 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. > If parcel data is important to disaster response, I would expect the responder to go get the most up to date data from the source, not use stale data that was imported into OSM (potentially) some years ago. The parcel ID is also useless to OSM. Similar to the geography, the parcel ID is useless without the "official" data to refer to. The only reason we see external IDs like this is because there's a hope that at some point we can merge improvements to the data from a future update to the external data set. OSM doesn't have that ability yet. > > I do not understand this constant desire to handicap the usefulness of OSM. > To the contrary, this whole conversation started because we received multiple complaints about this area from mappers who wanted to create data in this area but couldn't because of too much data. In that sense, this data is already handicapping the usefulness of OSM because it's deterring mappers from adding data to the area.
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