After that last message I sent, I thought it might be a good time to reiterate my one point of view here.
My impression is that the goal of the OSM project is to create the most useful Free (capital F Free) map of the world possible. For a long time, the only real way to do this was to gather data from various user contributed sources. Tracklogs, POIs etc., and so the project grew. Much data was contributed, and many man hours went in to the maps. The result of all that effort was very good coverage in some areas. (specifically areas where those involved in the project had interest). Enter the government.. Of course all of this data already existed in various forms in various places. No one who makes a street map these days goes out and surveys all the streets involved. The data was slowly amalgamated in to larger and larger sets by governmental agencies (municipal feeding provincial, feeding federal, with additions made at each level, and data agreements allowing various attributes to be shared or not). With new technologies, and public demand, it became possible (and economically feasible) to make this data available on a national level, and to make it Free (capital F Free), which is really cool. But where does this leave projects like OSM? Do they pack up and say "oh well, I guess our job is done now. We can all pack up and go home."? No. There is still much to be added to the governmental datasets that the 'man on the street' can do faster than the government. Heck, the Quebec roadset in the Geobase dataset is 6 years old! So where do we go? What we need, is a way to take advantage of the government datasets (it would be foolish to ignore them), in a way that promotes future additions to the dataset from users (in the form of filling in missing data, adding attributes, etc, etc, etc). Fortunately, the data contains a built in method for keeping track of whats what. We just need to keep the NIDs intact. Then any future releases of the government datasets can be integrated with the 'live' dataset in a way that doesn't compromise the user contributed edits (totally new roads will unfortunately have to be manually dealt with, but given that these should mostly be in areas of high interest, its unlikely that they will go unnoticed for long). Who does the above not make sense to? What problems can people point to in the above (one obvious one, is the problem of what to do with the existing data. My feeling is we need to filter out all road data with 'additional attributes', back it up, and then hope to manually add it back in (note, this would only be a major issue in areas where an effort had been made to name streets in a province that currently has no street names on geobase). Anyways, I'm off to bed. Happy new year everyone. Dale
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