On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Kevin Kenny <[email protected]> wrote: > As I've mentioned in the past, I have some personal mapping projects > that use OSM data. > > One at least one of them, I display icons for facilities such as > schools, hospitals, police and fire stations, and houses of worship. > I notice that a great many of the schools that appear in the generated > map are, in fact, not usable as landmarks, because the map is reporting > places where schoolhouses once stood; in many cases the sites have been > redeveloped and no trace of the historic school remains, or the site > has changed hands and the historic schoolhouse is now a private home. > For many of the old schoolhouses, it certainly isn't obvious from the > street that they were ever anything but private homes. [ ... ] > I have read http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/USGS_GNIS - but I find > it uninformative for answering this question. I see the instruction, > "If you come across a feature that no longer exists in the real world, > feel free to delete it," [ ... ] > If my question has no good answer, I'd rather tolerate the clutter > than mess up the map.
When you have local knowledge that supersedes existing map data, please fix the data. :-) That "If you come across a feature that no longer exists in the real world, feel free to delete it," is pretty good general guidance. Your first-quoted paragraph above suggests that you are looking for historic markers and other evidence. That's good too. If there is such a marker, you might consider adding a tag for it to the otherwise ordinary not-school-building. There might be other exceptions as well, that would lead you to tag something like, loc_name="The old school house what ain't thar no more" if it is still used as a local landmark based only on local knowledge but I'd expect that to be rare. :-) And, with GNIS and any other source, the questionable data that you are seeing could well be an error from the source. Recapping: If your local survey suggests that something is gone, then you can delete it from the database. Use your best judgement. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
