Hello, A week ago we announced the plan to import better coastline and new ice shelf data for Antarctica on this list. We also sent mails about these plans to [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. (The last is the New Zealand OSM list, people from there had been importing official New Zealand Government data to Antarctica and we wanted to coordinate with them.)
Please see the wiki for the current state of this proposal: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Antarctica/Import_2013 There were a few questions about our plans and some objections to the planned removal of the Antarctica-wide glacier multipolygon and the change of the coastline from the "grounding line" to the "calving line". We answered all these mails and explained our reasoning. The coastline closing question which has been discussed as well won't seriously affect the import since we can artificially close it if necessary although we would prefer not to. We haven't heard any further arguments or objections in the last days so we believe people are generally happy with our plans. If we don't see any objections in the next days, we will do the import on the next weekend (March 16./17.). The import will be done according to the plan outlined on the wiki page, a special user will be used for the import and it will be done in a single or very few changesets, so if there are any problems it is easy to revert. One further issue: Before announcing the import we had contacted the SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) concerning possible use of the Antarctic Digital Database (http://www.add.scar.org/). This data is more detailed and mostly newer than what we plan to import now but it is assembled from various sources making it somewhat non-uniform. Last week, after our announcement here we got permission for using their data in OSM. We have looked into this data but nevertheless decided to "stick to the plan" and import the MOA data first. Here are the reasons: The MOA data is much better than what we currently have and it can be imported all at once. We can test the new tagging scheme with it and we can easily revert if there are problems. The ADD data is significantly more detailed and our first analysis revealed various inconsistencies that need to be dealt with. This means there is more work involved preparing it for import and it will be necessary to do this in several pieces. This will be much easier with a fairly accurate data set and tagging already in place. So we want to do the MOA import as planned - although we might leave out those islands that require significant hand work to avoid the need to do this twice. Afterwards we can work on the ADD data, but that will be a separate effort. Maybe it can be done as a community effort where people check and import pieces of the data. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
