[OSM-dev] Structured error messages from API

[Matthias Julius]

Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Ian Dees wrote:
>> Yea, I suppose that requires some discussion. The idea arose from a 
>> meeting I recently attended with some US city government GIS people that 
>> have expressed interest in maintaining (at least part of) their official 
>> GIS database in OpenStreetMap. Their number one fear/concern is an OSM 
>> editor changing the "official" boundary of a state forest, pulling that 
>> change back to do cartography for a hunting season (for example), and 
>> then having a land owner call them up asking why people are hunting on 
>> their land.
>
> The proper way to deal with this is to make it easier for OSM-related 
> tools to access third party databases, then tell the gov't guys to 
> maintain their data in such a "certified OSM compatible third party 
> database".

Hey, there's a new business opportunity!

> Anything that goes into OSM must be changeable by OSM mappers. We're
> not a hosting service for 3rd party data ,-)

Yes, if they want to control their data they should setup their own
API server and give everyone read access to it.  If then someone is
interested in the data he will find a way to merge it with OSM data.

Matthias