Hi, In Poland we have quite a few addresses imported from government sources for quite long time, but as time goes on, changes are made to the source databases, and local communities don't have any viable tools, to track, what has changed in source. In case of city of Skarżysko-Kamienna, local mapper tried hard to track all the changes in source (as well as check this on site), but still, missed a lot of changes, and as it's now - there is no tooling to help such users.
What I'd like to do, is to prepare a service, that will generate changes for OSM containing differences for each municipality, so local mapper can load, review and decide what to import. But this tool, to be efficient, needs additional information to be stored in OSM - identifier of the object in the source database, for which i propose tag: ref:addr. This tag is used for both identifying what was already imported, as well as, I'd like to create a protocol, that if there are some "wrong" data in the import source, we would leave a point in OSM containing: addr:ref source:addr So we can instruct further imports, to skip this point, unless there will be some change in source data. I find this solution most robust, as it gives great Signal-to-Noise ratio for local mappers, when they are identifying what needs to be updated, as well as, gives as resilience when someone accidentally deletes some address. In Poland there thousands of people employed by government to keep this data in good quality and using OSM community to duplicate their work is in my opinion - wasteful. Using this method, we can use their work, and use OSM community to improve the data, that government is sourcing. And this is something we should consider for all of the imports. We had some discussion about this already in Polish community, but as it seems, it might be philosophical change for this project, I'd like to raise this issue on global level. Apart from addresses I plan to start importing national heritage objects, for which I see exactly the same problem. The other solution that we discussed in our community is to keep track of import source state in separate database, and use this, to see what has changed in source, to generate files for local mappers, but I see following disadvantages of such solution: - such solution doesn't take into account current state of objects in OSM, what may generate duplicates or miss data, that were accidentally deleted - it makes harder to fork OSM project, as you need to fork two databases, know about them, and the license for such database should be open - it still needs some "protocol" to this database, to mark that import was done (and in what extent) - it would require additional tooling and might be additional problem to causual mappers, and probably would render the tool unusable - it gives no tools for integrity with OSM databases - needs additional support The disadvantages of my solution, that I found most concerning were: - nodes contaning only ref:addr and source:addr might be hard to understand by newcomers, especially that ref:addr doesn't contain any human-understandable data - ref:addr might get clobbered during merge of nodes But I hope that with extensive description on Wiki we can handle that problems. Cheers, Wiktor Niesiobędzki _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
