On 29/07/2014 23:03, Dave F. wrote:
... Is the data valid? Is it an accurate import? Would he have flagged it up if the user had added them manually one at a time? If the answers are Yes/Yes/No, then is there a genuine problem?
I suspect the answers are currently "FSVO valid" (inasmuch it's what the council's contractors think they have), "out of date as soon as the button was pressed", and "no" - but more importantly it misses a couple of basic issues:
One is that, independently of any "import rules", it's surely just basic communication and politeness, if you're uploading 1776 pages of data to a shared database that refers to a remote town in another country, to actually talk to people locally first. I can think immediately of a couple of other things that would come out of that discussion. One is "are there any areas where streetlights have already been mapped" (answer yes, the gaslights in the Park certainly are). We'd want to make sure that any import didn't duplicate existing data. The second would be to consider what other data could be usefully captured at the same time - such as who owns or operates the lights and how much is it costing the locals. It's a PFI scheme, so some sort of independent oversight, or interfacing with people looking to provide independent oversight, would surely make sense.
The second is that this is open data. There's no immediate reason just to dump it into OSM just _because_ it's open data (especially if there are no plans for maintenance of it once it's in there - the source website says "Frequency of update - Continually"). It's not going to stop being available (in its "continually updated" form) from opendatanottingham.org.uk - why is it beneficial to have an out-of-date copy in OSM too? The answer to that part might be "because OSM already stores some streetlights", but of course there needs to be a plan to keep the data up to date, and to understand what other data people making maps and using OSM data in Nottingham find important, and this just hasn't been done.
Cheers, Andy
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