[OSM-dev] A new take on the "mutable" idea

[Matt Amos]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Russ Nelson<russ at cloudmade.com> wrote:
> On Jun 21, 2009, at 6:49 AM, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
>> Frederik Ramm wrote:
>>> However, we'll have more and more imports like boundaries, seamarks
>>> and so on, which I like to consider "mutable for people who know
>>> exactly what they're doing".
>>
>> Is this actually a real-world problem right now, or something we
>> think might
>> possibly one day become one?
>
> Legal boundaries *aren't* a real-world problem right now?  We need to
> have them in OSM otherwise people will start adding them.  And yet, if
> the data came from an import from the governmental body responsible
> for maintaining the legal description, what justification could
> anybody have for changing them (pace anarchists, but even anarchists
> will recognize land registries as long as they're voluntary).

we went over this before: if it isn't editable, it shouldn't be in
OSM. there's nothing to stop people adding 3rd party datasets into
renderings based on OSM or using these boundaries to perform analysis
on OSM data. i can't see a good reason why OSM has to import
*everything* - we're not the ultimate data repository, we're the free
*wiki* world map.

also, we should all be trying to follow the "on the ground rule" [1]
and "verifiability" rule [2] - so if something isn't surveyable on the
ground, it probably shouldn't be in OSM.

there's yet another problem with legal boundaries; usually they're
defined as following existing features, such as rivers, coasts,
mountain ranges and even roads. so what happens when we improve the
positional accuracy of that feature - shouldn't the boundary be
updated too?

cheers,

matt

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes#On_the_Ground_Rule
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Verifiability