Hi, On 10/23/2014 08:57 AM, Marc Gemis wrote: > Wouldn't it be great that we would have import tools that can be used by > many groups ?
As far as addresses are concerned, there's "OpenAddresses" (the US version, not the older Swiss project) that collects openly licensed address data and to my knowledge they're also looking into how that data can then be combined with OSM for geocoding, without actually importing it in OSM. To my mind that's an excellent solution; you can dump address data into the pool and have it processed without interfering with the manually surveyed data that is in OSM. And users can be given the choice of using only the manually surveyed data, or only the government data, or a mixture of both. OSM is not a melting pot for the world's open data and while there is a place for imports, every import will have to be carefully thought about and evaluated. Streamlining that process is not necessarily in the best interest of OpenStreetMap. Frankly, I don't get all the brouhaha about addresses. Yes, geocoding is commercially interesting, but is it interesting for us as a project? Are the mappers in OSM doing what they do because they always wanted to have a house-level free geocoder? I very much doubt that. Technology wise, I find it almost insulting to reduce OSM to a geocoding database and measure OSM in how many addresses it has. There's so much more to the data we collect than merely placing a latitude and longitude against an address. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk