"OSM is not a giant collection bowl for data ("oh look I've found a scrap of
data on my city's web site, let's upload that to OSM so that it don't get
lost!!!").
OSM is a giant *editor*. OSM is for *editing* data."
I strongly disagree. OSM is for the user, not for the editor. OSM -is- a giant
collection bowl for data. It exists to allow access to data that might
otherwise be inaccessible. Crowdsourcing is the means, not the ends.
"Anything that is surveyed and that can be updated by normal citizens can
benefit from being in OSM; where people survey such data and put it in into
OSM, they open the data up for the helping hands of others."
The very foundation of cadastral data is ground survey. I know from experience
that most GIS cadastral data is obtained by heads up digitizing, not from
original documents. It is actually an ideal area for crowdsourcing. Interested
users can access original documents and reconstruct the boundaries correctly
and at much greater accuracy than the cities.
(Incidentally, normally there is no "authoritative" source for GIS cadastral
data in the US, and where there is an authoritative source, it is not the
cities but rather the counties. What the city of Fresno provides is no more
authoritative than anything drawn by an OSM user using recorded deeds.)
--Brett
Brett Lord-Castillo
Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
St. Louis County Police
Office of Emergency Management
_______________________________________________
Talk-us mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
