On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 11:40 PM, Jeff Meyer <j...@gwhat.org> wrote:
> All of the rules about observability and verifiability apply to country and
> state borders, as well, as Mike states, but we include them and somehow
> improve them.

Have we improved them? Being the last user to touch about 35% of all
county boundary relations in the US, I've seen a lot of breaking too.
One exception: some of the Oregon counties that were improved by
Trimet with local data. There were a lot of untouched ways from the
original import which were overlapping/duplicated closed ways. A lot
of them had been operated on by a duplicate node removal bot that
joined nodes with TIGER roads wherever the two intersected which made
them a pain to edit. A number of them that had been converted to
relations had either broken geometry or inconsistent tagging - and
still do. I've been meaning to bring this up at some point. The entire
western border of Colorado was once moved a few hundred meters east by
accident without the user even noticing that they had touched a state
border.

I think it would be great to make more tools support more external
data sets as opposed to dumping *everything* into OSM. You want county
borders on your garmin? Check a box while creating the file and mkgmap
downloads the most recent county borders from some source that isn't
OSM and includes them. Now, building this functionality into every
tool that uses OSM data may not be practical. But I can definitely see
a place for a parallel project that hosts all such boundary data
(maybe even parcel data) from official sources in a common format and
can be easily mixed with OSM data before being fed to existing tools.
I think this was the idea behind CommonMap although I see this
particular implementation hasn't fared particularly well as the domain
seems to have expired... But the idea may warrant another look.

Toby

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