On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote: > Alan, > > Alan Mintz wrote: >> >> I just tried to look at tagwatch for North-america and got a 404, possibly >> because there is no north-america directory at >> http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/ either. What's up? > > We haven't been doing North America for a while now. It puts considerable > strain on our processing chain and is little used (i.e. we use almost as > much bandwidth uploading the stuff to the server every day as people use for > downloading). Most people who have computing resources sufficient for North > America can also process the whole planet so we thought we needn't bother.
Frederik seems happy to process European data, since there are many more people using and benefiting from this, as opposed to North American data, where there are much fewer contributors-per-node and fewer people interested in downloading what is little more than slightly rehashed versions of giant public-domain datasets (TIGER, NHD etc). Unfortunately turning off the few community tools that cover North America can only make this imbalance worse! We should be doing every last thing possible to make it easier for our North American community to digest and improve the bulk-imported data, and for the community to grow and achieve the critical mass they need - whether that's tagwatch, extracts, garmin downloads or whatever. Does anyone have a list of services (or maps etc) which don't cover North America? I know that we managed to expand keepright to cover NA in October 2009, and so I'm especially disheartened to see things sliding in the other direction. Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
