Hi, On Tue, 1 Nov 2011 17:14:03 -0600 Martijn van Exel <m...@rtijn.org> wrote: > But let's discuss: are > address imports useful (I say yes, for geocoding and routing they're > indispensable), necessary (I say yes, potential OSM data users will > want to be able to do these things) and feasible (I say yes, if > there's local mappers to oversee it)? Best,
They are useful if you want OSM to be your quick fix to some itch you want to scratch. If you cannot be bothered to process the freely available hosue number datasets properly yourself but would rather abuse OSM as your free data processor where you dump in whatever you have and whoopsie, magically it becomes useful in MapQuest's Nominatim, then yeah, sure, go ahead, import until the shit comes out of everyone's ears - why learn from past mistakes. You probably think that OSM in the US is so broken, it cannot get worse no matter how much additional data sources you dump onto OSM. You know as well as I do that your "local mappers to oversee it" is a fig leaf! Importing more and more data will not make OSM strong. It might make OSM look useful in the short term but that's cheap usefulness - the same usefulness could be produced by just importing all your free sources into some other consolidated data set, something that is not unique to OSM, something that anyone can do at any time in their basement without the help of a crowd-sourced project. And for this cheap usefulness you are ruining the chances of there ever being a strong community - instead you'll have a few people acting as funnels for data dumped in from whatever sources. This is not the way to achieve a community that owns the map. And you know that and *still* you're happy to do it. OSM will never get anywhere in the States if people think like this. And that from someone who only just moved over! Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
