Nick,
I'm taking this opportunity to make a general statement about the
kind of import you are suggesting. I'm not singling out you specifically
- I'm talking to everyone in a similar situation.
On 10.06.2012 20:32, Nicholas Doiron wrote:
OpenStreetMap coverage for this area is mostly roads from an outdated
TIGER import. A handful of people have traced city hall, school and
university campuses, and a few other buildings. To maintain the
community's existing work, I can do an inventory of buildings currently
in OSM through Migurski's city Metro Extracts:
http://metro.teczno.com/#macon-ga and avoid overwriting them.
I'm new to the OSM imports list, so please let me know how I should
handle this dataset. I'd also appreciate your advice on communicating
the importance of OSM to a local government.
Data itself is relatively uninteresting for us. If there is nobody in
the area who wants to actively *care* for what you are planning to
import, then in a few years people will talk about data in Bibb County
like you are now: "OSM coverage for this area is mostly an outdated
building footprint import..."
The building footprints may add a little short-term eye candy to the map
but they don't per se improve the health of OSM in the area. Imports are
not forbidden but they should really be part of a healthy plan to make
OSM thrive in the area; if you're just offloading (or uploading) a few
coloured rectangles to our database then we're not so keen on that.
Try to make contact with the "handful of people" you are talking about.
Are they local? Do they have a vision for OSM in the area? Are they keen
on having a building dataset to work on/with? Are you?
Importing data into OSM is a task that is not finished once you've
uploaded the data; if there's no community to adopt (or even assimilate)
the data afterwards then all you're doing is adding bit-rot, something
that looks nice for a while but doesn't add value (after all, someone
who wants the original, un-modified city building footprints on the map,
could as well load a shape file from there and put them in).
Without wanting to sound too biblical, you need to make sure that your
import is a seed planted in fertile ground.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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