On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 13:10 -0600, James Ewen wrote: > > Since GeoBase stores every road segment between junctions as > individual ways, and OSM and GeoBase could potentially be sharing data > in both directions, then we need to try and keep the data structure as > compatible as possible.
I have to say that as someone who uses OSM data in my own projects, I really don't like the idea of creating our own "OSM-CA" mapping and tagging conventions. Do we really want to be formatting our OSM data differently from international conventions? This basically amounts to asking everyone who writes tools/products that read/write OSM data (which go far beyond the OSMARender and Potlatch editor, see for example the developer tools at http://cloudmade.com) to accomodate us. If every country were to do this, writing useful software and tools that use OpenStreetMap information would quickly become unmanageable. I strongly believe that our only chance of making OpenStreetMap broadly useful is to conform to the international conventions on tagging/formatting the data. As others have pointed out, it should be possible to retroactively run tools like roadmatcher (or custom python scripts like the one I wrote several months ago: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/2009-April/001001.html) on the imported data as it changes. Likewise, we should be mostly able to import things like address information using some kind of bulk import process that matches on geometry. What's mostly needed is people with the time and persistence to step up to the plate (I apologize for not being able to do so myself-- hopefully I'll have more time to work on my tools sometime later in the summer). -- William Lachance <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
