[Imports-us] Welcome and Next Steps

Serge Wroclawski emacsen at gmail.com
Fri Jan 11 02:53:26 GMT 2013


On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Toby Murray <toby.murray at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, thanks to SteveC's push for addressing we can probably count on
> addresses being one class of import that we are likely to be dealing
> with. Building footprints also seem to be a popular subject.

They're both popular import targets, and I think they both make sense.
In fact, this idea that we come across the same type of data makes me
think that we may want to take note of specific issues that come up
with certain types of data in order to anticipate and address common
problems.

> As it happens, I am preparing an address import myself right now which
> I suppose could be used as a test case...

Sure. You're a very experienced mapper so this should be a fairly
"easy" case in some ways.

If you want to wait for Paul's code (which I'm certainly interested
in), I'm sure we could get other volunteers.

> One thing that we may need to give some thought to is how to get the
> message out there that this committee exists and should be contacted.

When we're ready, my plan was:

1. Send an announcement to several mailing lists (talk-us, imports, talk)
2. Update the US wiki, as well as the import guidelines wiki
3. Make a note on help.osm.org
4. Post something to the OSM forums (I've never used the forums but
apparently some people do).
5. Make periodic notes to the talk-us list about the import committee
6. Periodically check for imports going on in the DB and steer them to
us if necessary

> This is a general problem with OSM imports. Some problem imports are
> performed by people who have not read the import guidelines because
> they don't even know they exist. They just have data they want to add
> and assume it is just like any other edit. Right now we have some ways
> of detecting it and stopping it but it would be even better if we
> could intercept the process before the first upload happens.

Those are API issues IMHO[1], and somewhat beyond the scope of the
committee (though not beyond the skillset of several of us.

- Serge

[1] One could imagine time based API limits, which would prevent
accounts that weren't registered as bots from making more than N edits
a day, especially creations. These may not stop every importer, but it
might slow many bots down.



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