On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Andy Allan <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm not suggesting that > we map everything with GPSes out on the ground, but I strongly believe > importing data is detrimental to growing the community. Of course > that's unprovable, but I believe there's only so many correlations > before causation can be reasonably suspected.
I think the notion that importing data is detrimental to growing the community is detrimental to growing the community. And I think that's a big part of the causation of the current stagnation of US interest. The US is fairly unique in the world in that all the federal government created databases are public domain, as well as much of the state created databases. Yes, there was a bad TIGER import, which wasn't even that bad at first but was not designed to facilitate updates (importing TLIDs was a huge mistake, for starters). You can't build a competitive map in the United States without utilizing imports. It's just idiotic to throw away all that hard earned public domain data. You're giving up too much data that all your competitors have, and that they can and do use without restriction. That may not be true anywhere else in the world (it's certainly not true where the government data is copylefted), but it's true in the US. [quote]Make a mistake with the import, just one; duplicate too many nodes, overwrite existing data, import from a low-quality or old source, fail to connect it to existing data, and suddenly you are causing harm. Net harm. Not just "less good" but straight into "bad."[/quote] That's absolutely true with OSM. But it's not an inescapable fact of life. It's a fact derived from the lack of support of OSM for imports. _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
