On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Brett Lord-Casitllo <marigol...@yahoo.com>wrote:
> "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.
>
OSM would not exist if it weren't for the thousands and thousands of
contributors. They helped grow and evolve OpenStreetMap into the lively
open community that it is today, and suggesting that OpenStreetMap is not
for them is a complete misrepresentation of the project. If you want a
geospatial datawarehouse, set up an SDI. OpenStreetMap is a community
project. Where an infusion of open data can help or kickstart that
community, it will be considered, but always with great scrutiny. Which is
what this thread is about.
>
> "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.)
>
I do agree that there's an opportunity for crowdsourcing in cadastral
surveying, but we should be approaching that very carefully and in the
right order. First examine the legal implications of letting the world at
large have r/w access to cadastral parcel geometry. Then bring government
and OSM folks together to sort out if and how OSM could be a platform. And
then import and conflate data. As far as I know, nothing tangible has been
done to complete steps 1 and 2, and here we are discussing step three. I
don't think it's quite time for that yet.
I'm interested in having that discussion, but we do need some common ground
about what and for whom OSM is.
--
martijn van exel
geospatial omnivore
1109 1st ave #2
salt lake city, ut 84103
801-550-5815
http://oegeo.wordpress.com
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