[OSM-dev] OpenStreeetMap and X-Plane for collecting GIS data

[Ben Supnik]

Hi Roger,

Rogier Wolff wrote:
> Additional info like height is something that I find allowable as a
> tag.

 From an airplane-map-centric viewpoint, height is very important. :-) 
Things that are tall are more dangerous!!

> (The Dutch maps are littered with AND_ID=... from the import of the
> AND-data. Who is ever going to use that again???)

Sorry, tangent...a lot of what I do in creating the scenery involves 
processing GIS data to improve plausibility of our final render; for 
this, having unique IDs from original imports is not a bad thing at 
all...it allows us to identify whole sets of the map that might have 
common properties (good or bad), etc.

For example, while looking at Boston I found a whole pile of stacked up 
data - it looked like some mix of user-entered tracks, massGIS, and 
TIGER.  (I do not know if this area has been resolved - this 
investigation was months ago.)

 From our stand-point, plausibility is important, so we need to 
"declutter" an area with multiple versions of a road network.  With the 
import tags preserved, we can put in some hierarchy rules, e.g. mass-gis 
beats tiger, tiger beats untagged, then create a buffer around all 
tagged features and nuke any intersecting features with a lower priority 
tag category.

If the tags are stripped out, then all I have is a giant pile of 
overlapping lines, with no idea which ones go with which other ones.

> To me this sounds like a data maintenance nightmare. 

Quite possibly yes, but at least it's not the OSM community's nightmare. :-)

cheers
ben

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