[Imports] Fargo Stop Signs

[Richard Weait]

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 10:57 AM, Andrew Buck <andrew.r.buck at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I recently spent a few hours down at the city of Fargo, North Dakota GIS
> department talking to them about OSM.  While I was there they gave me a few
> datasets of theirs for use in OSM to use as we please.

That's cool.  Nice to find that so many municipalities are climbing
aboard Open Data.

Please be sure to log these datasets in the import catalogue  on the
wiki.  That page is getting big, so it's probably worth splitting it
and putting sub-country imports on sub-pages.  Be sure to document it,
please.

> All of the data is public domain,

I'm glad that they want the data to propagate but I expect that it is
not actually public domain.  As I understand it, works only fall into
the public domain once copyright expires.  The noteworthy exception is
for a class of US Federal government works[1], which doesn't apply
here unless City of Fargo is not a federal gov't agency?

This misunderstanding of (Federal) (government) copyright is pervasive.

Their intent is great.  Please get them to back you up on this with an
email from them saying that the data may be included in OSM under the
CTs and ODbL.  Better still, if they can inform themselves about Open
Data licenses and then adopt and publish under ODC-PDDL.  This
nonsense of having to read and vet some whacky custom license from
every little village is just insane.  Stop the madness.

> so the
> license is no problem but I plan to add source="Fargo GIS" to anything I get
> from them just to keep track of the data.

Please put the tags on the changeset instead of every object.  Once
the objects are in OSM, and revised and improved by other mappers, the
source tag becomes misleading.

~~~dream sequence~~~
Consider the TIGER tags.  Those were heady days, we were young,
idealistic, and we had acres of unmapped land in front of us.  TIGER
went in and we all thought that dropping full tags on each object was
great.  Now we know that many TIGER ways have never been touched
again.  Now we know that the TIGER data was bad bad bad in some
places.  Now we see the TIGER tags as more of a warning label, like
the skull and crossbones on a bottle of household cleaner.
~~~ end dream sequence ~~~

> All the data will be manually entered by me (using my AndrewBuck_Imports
> account) and I plan to do it in small chunks of the city so approximately a
> dozen or so changesets in total each with a section of the city imported
> (maybe 100 signs per changeset).  I have uploaded the .osm file to dropbox
> (link below) and await further feedback from the list on how to proceed
> next.

Good, the import account is important.  I think your plan to proceed
in small chunks is a good approach.  Especially in the early stages.
Think about how much you would be willing and able to clean up by hand
if you had to.  Before you have to run out to an important
appointment.  Then work in smaller pieces than that. :-)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government