On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Russ Nelson<[email protected]> wrote: > On Jun 21, 2009, at 6:49 AM, Richard Fairhurst wrote: >> Frederik Ramm wrote: >>> However, we'll have more and more imports like boundaries, seamarks >>> and so on, which I like to consider "mutable for people who know >>> exactly what they're doing". >> >> Is this actually a real-world problem right now, or something we >> think might >> possibly one day become one? > > Legal boundaries *aren't* a real-world problem right now? We need to > have them in OSM otherwise people will start adding them. And yet, if > the data came from an import from the governmental body responsible > for maintaining the legal description, what justification could > anybody have for changing them (pace anarchists, but even anarchists > will recognize land registries as long as they're voluntary).
we went over this before: if it isn't editable, it shouldn't be in OSM. there's nothing to stop people adding 3rd party datasets into renderings based on OSM or using these boundaries to perform analysis on OSM data. i can't see a good reason why OSM has to import *everything* - we're not the ultimate data repository, we're the free *wiki* world map. also, we should all be trying to follow the "on the ground rule" [1] and "verifiability" rule [2] - so if something isn't surveyable on the ground, it probably shouldn't be in OSM. there's yet another problem with legal boundaries; usually they're defined as following existing features, such as rivers, coasts, mountain ranges and even roads. so what happens when we improve the positional accuracy of that feature - shouldn't the boundary be updated too? cheers, matt [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes#On_the_Ground_Rule [2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Verifiability _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
