[Imports-us] Importing NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries

[Ian Dees]

Simply because there's other old and rotting data (county borders, Census
"places" boundaries, national park boundaries, etc.) in OSM doesn't mean
that we should add new data that will become old and rot.

Again, if you're interested in showing these boundaries on your company's
website (http://blueseed.co/faq/#map), I'm happy to help show how that can
happen. The boundaries will be more accurate and up to date (since they're
coming from a primary source) and they won't pollute the OSM dataset.


On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Dan Dascalescu (Blueseed)
<dan at blueseed.com>wrote:

> Ian, I'm an OSM volunteer (http://hdyc.neis-one.org/?dandv) and I've
> submitted updates since 2008 based on my own observations on the ground. I
> fully support and understand the mission of OSM.
>
> Imaginary boundaries, unfortunately, can by definition not be confirmed on
> the ground. Yet their utility is also quite clear. OSM features county
> lines and many other administrative boundaries that have no correspondence
> on the ground, and whose source is almost always external and the sole
> authority over the boundary.
>
> In the particular case of water boundaries, I case see several actual use
> cases:
> 1. Marine sanctuaries often don't allow personal watercraft. An OSM user
> could use the map to stay outside of the boundaries.
> 2. Zero-discharge areas don't allow activities one would ordinarily
> consider harmless, such as washing one's sailboat. An OpenSeaMap user could
> sail outside of the boundary in that case.
> 3. The display of the NOAA Sanctuaries boundaries on OpenSeaMap (at least,
> if not also on OpenStreetMaps) can help educate the public on the extent of
> protected ocean areas. In the particular area we're interested in, nature
> reserves are already marked on land -
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/37.7637/-122.5903
>
> Based on these reasons, I think it would be useful to import the NOAA
> Marine Sanctuaries data into OSM.
>
> On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 2:33 PM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dan, OpenStreetMap's strength is that volunteers can verify the data by
>> observing it on the ground. Boundaries imported from external sources,
>> especially those in the water, are essentially "dead data" that cannot be
>> improved upon unless the external data source changes the data. That sort
>> of data isn't very useful to OSM and it's not my opinion that it shouldn't
>> be in OSM.
>>
>
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