On Sat, 2011-02-19 at 19:40 -0800, Daniel Sabo wrote: > Maybe you don't like it, but you are not the entire OSM community. Yes, > in this case someone overwritten what I presume was good surveyed data > with an import was stupid. But in general the fact that data was > gathered by a government surveyor with tools an order of magnitude > more accurate than ours does not, IMHO, make it less "worthy" of being > in OSM.
As was stated in the previous email, OSM isnt designed to simply be an API for people to load government data into. Your comment about the 'order of magnitude more accurate than ours', shows that maybe you need to read about the airport import, where some airports were added many kilometres away from their accurate location, or several cases reported here in the last few weeks of deleted surveyed data and tags, replaced with generic un-verified tags. Yes, some imports are good, especially when the community is consulted and comes up with a proper way to import/tag/maintain them, but if one individual just decides to use their own data sources, with their own tags without consultation with the community, it almost always leads to more damage than added value. Its no good doing an import that 'saves' 20 hours of handwork, if it takes 100 hours of handwork to correct it. One practical example of this, was when I made a cross-country trip last year, and found some fuel stations were mapped upto 100km away from their real location. Imagine if someone was relying on that data, in a remote area if could be life-endangering, or worse imagine if it was a hospital import. Some things Id rather not have mapped, than to have them mapped possibly inaccurately, or to at least have renderers show imported data with a warning to be wary of its accuracy. David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk