On 30.07.2012, at 10:54, Jan Kučera wrote: > Hello again, > > 2012/7/29 Frederik Ramm <[email protected]>: >> Hi, >> >> Only if these areas are verifiable and editable by mappers should they >> be in OSM! > > I understand core of this point. These are "artificial" boundaries > (with a physical "sign" placed sometimes in the field - varies greatly > country by country I can imagine, but is nothing useful for mapping) > but as Mikel says currently such areas are present in OSM and there > are no "official" restrictions for mapping these known to me so far... > Surely these areas will not change a lot in the future, so the > advantage of having them in OSM is just using one single > platform/database with single API as for other OSM-objects... like > this we could surely delete all national borders etc... would not make > a lot of sence either. > > I understand the possibility od having a standalone data just for > rendering though... is there a common practice how to include these > into main osm-mapnik layer (= without having these in main database)?
Right, this is data is nice for rendering, and is quite useless for the OSM, i.e. community editing. Rendering by whom? If you build your own renderer, you can add all this kind of datasets to it; the question is from where to find the data (discovery issue). If you use the mapnik, then the data should be somewhere in OSM servers. Technical proposal: what about setting up a shared GIS server somewhere next to Mapnik renderer, so it would provide both usable CMS and hosting for this kind of datasets? So community can upload their shapefiles with metadata there, Mapnik can use them and other community renderers can download and use them too if they need to. Technically there are already some shapefile-based datasets in mapnik renderer (coastlines hosted in SVN); what is missing is a scalable interface to add other external datasets. There are several opensource GIS server packages which could be good fit, Geoserver seems to be closest to me. Sure, it has a lot of GIS stuff we don't really need right away, and may miss some features, but it seems to have good base to get started with it. It does not solve the question whether to import specific data to OSM or not. I have one experience with administrative boundaries: many of the borders were going along rivers; and as this data was more accurate in OSM already then I ended up with more accurate administrative data in OSM than it was in the official shapefile. With separate shapefiles you would not get this effect. But still I think that this benefit was quite marginal one, and this kind of data should be kept separate. Jaak _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
