<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><br> <div><span>Richard,</span></div><div><br><span></span></div><div><span>OSM is surely an ambitious project with </span><span id="yiv242673197result_box" class="yiv242673197" lang="en"><span class="yiv242673197hps">many</span> <span class="yiv242673197hps">pitfalls</span> <span class="yiv242673197hps">along
the way. We are an Open organization with people having various
computer and mapping experiences. I think that the Talk-ca list role is
more to try offering guidelines and priorities. Either importing data or
GPS traces, people may make mistakes. Should we offer more training
then? Find ways to recruit more people? Prior to that, maybe we should
assure to offer appealing OSM products, easily accessible (ie. Maps, GPS
Imports).<br></span></span></div><br><div><span id="yiv242673197result_box" class="yiv242673197" lang="en"><span class="yiv242673197hps">Nominatim
searches are central to OpenStreetMap. We should then make
particular efforts to import boundary data. And this task should
surely be done only by people having enough mapping experience to do
it. It is not an easy task. It is why I suggest that we explore ways of
doing it.</span></span></div><br>I would suggest Daniel to produce one
boundary OSM file for each province. And we should look locally the best
way to import it in OSM.<br> <br><span style="font-style:italic;color:rgb(0, 0, 191);font-weight:bold;">Pierre <br></span><br> <div dir="ltr"> <font face="Arial" size="2"> <hr size="1"> <b><span style="font-weight:bold;">De :</span></b> Richard Weait <richard@weait.com><br> <b><span style="
font-weight:bold;">À :</span></b> Talk-CA OpenStreetMap <talk-ca@openstreetmap.org> <br> <b><span style="font-weight:bold;">Envoyé le :</span></b> Mercredi 21 mars 2012 0h44<br> <b><span style="font-weight:bold;">Objet :</span></b> Re: [Talk-ca] Re : Administrative Boundary<br> </font> </div> <br><br>I'd like to suggest that we stop "importing", and start "referring to<br>external sources". Here's the key difference:<br><br>You map one object at a time while referring to external sources. So<br>you can give each object the attention it needs. imports drop large<br>numbers of object into the DB at one time. Each of that group of<br>objects only gets a small share of your attention.<br><br>I recently added municipal boundaries from Waterloo Region to OSM and<br>wrote up the experience.<br><br><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
href="http://opendataexpert.com/2012/using-waterloo-region-open-data/">http://opendataexpert.com/2012/using-waterloo-region-open-data/</a><br><br>It was a relatively long process, even though there were no existing<br>boundaries for the region. Each boundary had to be reconciled with<br>those of surrounding regions.<br><br>It's great to
have external sources. We have several of them to<br>consider including aerial imagery, NRCan data, perhaps city data and<br>more. We also have our local knowledge, survey track files, notes and<br>photographs. And none of them agree 100% with each other. :-) All<br>of our sources are lying to us and we have to make an educated<br>judgment about what the best answer might be, given conflicting<br>sources.<br><br>It makes no sense to discard our good judgment, merely to accurately<br>duplicate the errors of a single source. :-)<br><br>So let's stop "importing" and start using external sources in smarter ways.<br><br>_______________________________________________<br> </div></body></html>