On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 3:58 AM, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote:
> What we would really need though, is something much bigger: A separate > database of admin hierarchies, where people could - in a crowdsourced > manner - record things like: > > "There is an adminlevel 2 entities called Germany" > "It is divided into 16 exclusive adminlevel 4 entities with the > following names: ..." > "These 16 entities cover the area of Germany completely (no holes or sea > areas that would be outside of one of the entities)" > "The adminlevel 4 entity named 'Brandenburg' is divided in X adminlevel > 6 entities..." > > and so on. A tree of arbitrary size where people can add and edit at will. > This seems exactly like the kind of data I expect Wikidata (a Wikimedia Foundation project, spearheaded by Wikimedia Deutschland) to encode. > Now you will say "but this tree could be generated from OpenStreetMap", > and I grant that one could attempt to build such a tree but it will > always be faulty and reflect the current brokenness of geometries in > OSM. One could *start* with an OSM-generated tree, but after that, the > tree must be kept separate. People should be able to add stuff to the > tree even when it is not in OpenStreetMap - "there should be an > adminlevel 8 boundary called so-and-so". A regularly-running process > would then compare the tree to OpenStreetMap, and generate error reports > that can be presented visually: [...] > > I would expect the tree to be much more stable than the > data in OSM. Most of all, the tree could be worked on independently, > even by people unfamiliar with OSM. Of course the tree could link to OSM > objects but these links would regularly be checked and perhaps even > changed by the automated comparison system. > If this tree database will only be compared to OSM then it should be OK to start it as a derivative of the OSM database (inheriting the ODbL license). However, we lose the ability to compare this with other similar databases like the Global Administrative Areas database (http://www.gadm.org/) as another form of QA due to the license incompatibility. I think it would be better if the tree were started in Wikidata (which is CC0-licensed) or as a separate project released to the public domain or CC0- or PDDL-licensed. Eugene
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