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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>After that
last message I sent, I thought it might be a good time to reiterate my one
point of view here. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>My
impression is that the goal of the OSM project is to create the most useful
Free (capital F Free) map of the world possible. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>For a long
time, the only real way to do this was to gather data from various user
contributed sources. Tracklogs, POIs etc., and so the project grew. Much data
was contributed, and many man hours went in to the maps. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>The result
of all that effort was very good coverage in some areas. (specifically areas
where those involved in the project had interest). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Enter the
government…. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Of course
all of this data already existed in various forms in various places. No one who
makes a street map these days goes out and surveys all the streets involved.
The data was slowly amalgamated in to larger and larger sets by governmental
agencies (municipal feeding provincial, feeding federal, with additions made at
each level, and data agreements allowing various attributes to be shared or not).
With new technologies, and public demand, it became possible (and economically
feasible) to make this data available on a national level, and to make it Free
(capital F Free), which is really cool. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>But where
does this leave projects like OSM? Do they pack up and say “oh well, I
guess our job is done now. We can all pack up and go home.”? No.
There is still much to be added to the governmental datasets that the ‘man
on the street’ can do faster than the government. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Heck, the
Quebec roadset in the Geobase dataset is 6 years old!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>So where do
we go? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>What we
need, is a way to take advantage of the government datasets (it would be
foolish to ignore them), in a way that promotes future additions to the dataset
from users (in the form of filling in missing data, adding attributes, etc,
etc, etc). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Fortunately,
the data contains a built in method for keeping track of whats what. We just
need to keep the NIDs intact. Then any future releases of the government datasets
can be integrated with the ‘live’ dataset in a way that doesn’t
compromise the user contributed edits (totally new roads will unfortunately
have to be manually dealt with, but given that these should mostly be in areas
of high interest, its unlikely that they will go unnoticed for long). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Who does
the above not make sense to? What problems can people point to in the above
(one obvious one, is the problem of what to do with the existing data. My
feeling is we need to filter out all road data with ‘additional
attributes’, back it up, and then hope to manually add it back in (note,
this would only be a major issue in areas where an effort had been made to name
streets in a province that currently has no street names on geobase). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Anyways, I’m
off to bed. Happy new year everyone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Dale<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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