[Imports] [Talk-us] TriMet will begin OSM improvements in the Portland area

[Serge Wroclawski]

Obviously this mail was incomplete and fat fingered.... Let me finish now.

My main concern here is that the Arc tools are abstracting away
details about OSM that are unimportant when the workflow fits the Arc
model, but not the OSM model and workflow.

Specifically in this context, I'm concerned that if nodes are just
considered points, that nodes with other data might be inadvertently
lost, or else made wrong in a transfer.

This goes hand in hand with working in OSM vs one's own dataset, where
one can (and should) feel free to make large modifications in one's
one dataset, but working in a shared playground is much harder.

This concern isn't Tom specific, nor your project specific, but I'm
wondering how it is you're addressing this. I asked this question of
the ESRI folks who developed the tools and their response was that it
was the responsibility of the user. Compounding the challenge, if I
recall, the "layer" analogy extends to the OSM tools, so you might not
see objects' other tagging.

How are you overcoming these technical and cultural challenges as you
work to bring your data into OSM?

- Serge