"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
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