[Imports] Import/Bulk Edit classifications

Glen Barnes barnaclebarnes at mac.com
Thu Nov 8 21:53:01 UTC 2012


The New Zealand situation is one in which I think will become more and more common as governments open more of their geospatial data. We have a wide range of data that can be imported into OSM. 

* A lot of this data overlaps with existing content so there is no way we will just automate the imports. Tags need to be merged with existing content to create the 'best' version of a feature, some items need to be moved and some converted from nodes to ways. 
* The data is updated by LINZ frequently and we can get diffs of the data from LINZ. We want to be able to take those diffs create files and check those against what has already been uploaded to OSM. 
* LINZ wants to be able to read back the data from OSM so they can target areas to update 
* LINZ data is generally of a pretty high quality as they have used high resolution maps and on the ground confirmation.  
* We have a sparsely populated country with large areas of natural wilderness which is not well covered by Bing aerial imagery.
* LINZ and other Government organisations are very keen to see this data in OSM and for it to be reused.

Our solution is to build out http://linz2osm.openstreetmap.org.nz (source code) to make checkout and merging easily accessible to a wide range of mappers (both skilled and those who are just learning tools like JOSM). We've deliberately done things like limit the number of features to 100 for any checkout so that people don't just bulk add stuff to the map without checking for existing dups. We will also be building checking scripts to see what has been uploaded and checking for any errors we may find for later review.

So what do we call this type of upload? It isn't automated, it is isn't tracing. "Human Reviewed Imports"?  "Human Assisted Imports"?

Thanks,
Glen
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