On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 03:15:12PM +0100, Matt Amos wrote: > 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.
Maybe we should have everything in OSM, but we should have those valuable data sources with the accurate data! Currently we have a special database for GPS tracks. This is part of our source data. Everybody can use it to check his own tracks against other peoples tracks and both against the main OSM data. Maybe we should extend this model to other data sources. Say, you import all the roads in one country. The first step could be to load this into a "source" database. Like with the GPS tracks, it would contains the original data and that would never change. Then the normal data conversion and import into the mail OSM database is done. Along with the data we can store information about its source, accuracy, etc. The mapper then does what cartographers have been doing for centuries: They collect all data about an area, compare it and distill the best view out of the data that they can get. Everybody can still change everything, but everybody can also always get back to the original data. If we want it to be fancy, we can add ways of tracking where which data came from and introduce alerting mechanisms. Basically this idea acknowledges what has been true for a while: GPS tracks are only one of many sources. Imports are more important now and getting more and more so. And with more and more areas where the basic data is already complete, the job of the mappper moves from beeing somebody who enters new data to somebody who edits existing data. Somebody who does the hard work of integrating the data from different sources into a coherent hole. A job that doesn't work without the human judgment. Of course, for the mapper this would bring new challenges. He might be able to see 10 different layers of data in his editor with as many data sources. And he might have to look at them all to decide who is right and whats important. But humans are good at those things. Jochen -- Jochen Topf [email protected] http://www.remote.org/jochen/ +49-721-388298 _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
