[OSM-dev] coastline polygons

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> Sure, it's nice to be able to do that. But on the other hand there are
> hundreds of thousands of kilometres of coastline in Greenland, Norway,
> etc what no-one is ever going to check. It's going to be done by
> computer algorithm from satellite photos.

Hm.

Maybe we can then find some "override" method where a coastline, if 
present in OSM, is used, and an external source otherwise?

> However, my reason for seperating the data is something else: I would
> like the maps on openstreetmap to be just a layer in a more
> comprehensive system. 

I would like openstreetmap to be the comprehensive system, and everyone 
can extract whatever he/she wants. But this may be due to my limited 
exposure to digital mapping; I tend to assume that everything not in 
openstreetmap is hard to come by, expensive, and with tons of nasty 
licensing.

I guess it would be ok to mix in data from outside as long as it is 
really constant (i.e. we lose nothing by not giving mappers the chance 
to change it) and really public (i.e. we lose nothing by depending on 
external sources as they will always be available).

> Say we had a layer that gave altitudes. It would
> be nice to put that under the normal maps so you could make an atlas.

Sure!

> By insisting everything go into OSM you've cut that off.

I don't see how. It is just data, so why can it not go into OSM? With 
the added advantage that if I move some earth in my backyard, I can 
immediately correct the altitude data. I'm not talking today's OSM of 
course, but the bigger-better-faster OSM that will one day hold the 
whole world.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'