Jacob <[email protected]> writes: > Greg, thanks for pointing this out. I hope you know I'm doing my best > to meet the standards required for an import. I don't think it's very > nice to imply that I'm trying to avoid the hard work and just do the > fun part.
I didn't mean to say that. I think it's perfectly ok to approach a situation and do 20% of the work to get 90% of the benefit, as long as everything that is done is done right. My view is that doing an import correctly is difficult. My experience over the years is that people who are doing their first import tend to underestimate how hard it is by a lot, maybe 10x. I think it's important not to caused other contributors later to have to do anything remedial. I helped someone do their first import and I think at first they thought I was crazy for cautioning about difficulty. By the end they did not think I was crazy. What I was trying to say is that without the benefit of experience of getting all the way through an import, 2 years of living with it, and contemplating an update import, foreign keys seem like they ought to be broadly useful. My impression from the list is that almost no one who has that experience thinks so. Certainly anyone who has found them useful (when doing an update import, and really dealing with the hard cases correctly) should speak up. > For this issue specifically I think your idea of updating the > documentation to match your expectations would be best. That way > future importers will know what will likely be expected. (Eg no > foreign keys, etc. - Existing documentation seems to say that they are > OK.) That's a totally fair point. There is list consensus, and there is what the wiki says, and it's a bug and a feature of OSM that they are at times disconnected. What the wiki at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines says is two things. The main one is This doesn't include (for example) foreign keys from another database, unless those are absolutely necessary for maintaining the data in future. and I don't think what I'm saying is really different from that. I'm just saying that "it seems like it will be useful" does not seem to lead to "it will be useful" and it's a long way from "absolutely necessary". The other thing is You may have some metadata like the IDs used for your original data. If this metadata will be useful to OSM, then define your own prefix and use that on those metadata tags. The TIGER import for instance uses the "tiger:" prefix. The original ID of a TIGER object is tagged as "tiger:tlid". which I think is leftover from when the TIGER import thought that was a good idea. It dates from the initial 2013-01-02 version of the wiki page. It is also qualified with "if this metadata will be useful to OSM" which is a bit different than "if it would help you with a re-import". From being on this list for many years, I think the consensus has evolved that foreign keys are not useful and don't belong. I would really like to hear from people who have done imports and lived with them on this point. I propose to drop You may have some metadata like the IDs used for your original data. If this metadata will be useful to OSM, then define your own prefix and use that on those metadata tags. The TIGER import for instance uses the "tiger:" prefix. The original ID of a TIGER object is tagged as "tiger:tlid" from the "Use the right tags" section because it is a description of history, and I believe no longer the consensus view.
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