[Imports] How good can an import be?

[Anthony]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:58 AM, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 11:26 PM, Tyler Ritchie <tyler.ritchie at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It would take decades to get any sort of a meaningful map in the US without
>> the TIGER import.
>
> That's a defeatist attitude and not borne out by experiences elsewhere
> in the world.
>
>> Sure, the high population density areas will get mapped
>> well and quickly, but not the low density areas.
>
> As opposed to what happened after the TIGER import, where high
> population density areas haven't seen the same level of mapping
> activity/quality that we'd hoped for?
>
> I'm not arguing against using external datasets to help make the map,
> but the imports that are a direct substitute of things that are
> otherwise easily mappable seem to cause the most problems.

Whether the imports are actually imported or not, people know they're
there.  I don't think you're going to trick people into not realizing
that fact.

Yes, the presence of mountains of public domain data in the US is a
disincentive to getting out there with a GPS.  People don't like to
reinvent wheels.  But that's going to be true whether the data is
actually imported or not.