Brad — My reference to Gaia GPS was meant to illustrate that third party apps are perfectly capable of overlaying data from various sources. Just because a data source exists doesn’t mean that it should be in OSM. On the ground verifiability has always been the gold standard for OSM, and I feel strongly about keeping it that way. We have departed from that gold standard somewhat already, especially when it comes to administrative boundaries.
Another argument for keeping this data out of OSM comes to mind. In many places, OSM has come to be the most complete map out there. OSM data is now used by major companies and organizations, and is therefore increasingly seen as ’the truth’. With that comes scrutiny and responsibility. We have already seen the project drawn into political disputes that are not ours to take a stance in. To give one recent example, our representation of the Ukraine / Crimea border recently drew sharp criticism and unneeded negative attention to OSM that could easily have been avoided. I’m not saying that public lands boundaries in the U.S. are to be compared with international conflicts, but public lands are in fact under heavy scrutiny here in the West, and incorporating these boundaries into OSM would just generate another attack vector we can do without. If you want a Garmin map that incorporates both OSM data and boundary data from BLM or other federal or state sources, there are great ways to accomplish that goal, and I would be happy to help with it. Martijn > On Jan 6, 2019, at 8:50 AM, brad <bradha...@fastmail.com> wrote: > > Martijn, Gaia is not available on a Garmin, or on a PC. It also costs $40 a > yr. Why do you trust Gaia as an authoritative source? How often do they > update from government sources? BLM boundaries do not change very often. > Probably less often than city/town boundaries. For an authoritative > source, I have national forest maps that are 10 - 20 years old. A download > today from a federal database is way better than that and in 5 years will > probably still be just as good. In relatively sparsely populated areas, on > the ground verification does not work as well as it does in the city. If > we make OSM more useful for more people then more folks will get involved. >
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