[Imports] Importing Buildings and Addresses for Austin, Texas

[Paul Norman]

On 11/8/2015 8:58 PM, Andy Wilson wrote:
>
> If you could find time to look things over, we would really appreciate it.

Looking over the wiki documentation, I have a few comments

- The Google group 
(https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/atx-osm-import) is currently 
set to private.

- There seems to be inconsistency in how height is being handled. The 
wiki says cm, but the github repo is saying it's to the nearest 10cm. 
Meanwhile, the data that was inadvertently imported early has stuff like 
height=3.9099999999999997

- There's no mention of merging with existing POIs, e.g. 
osm.org/way/379207894 and osm.org/node/368164079

- How has the accuracy of the city data been assessed?

- You're proposing the changeset tags source=City of Austin; and a 
comment ending with "#atx-buildings-import, source=City of Austin".

I recommend adding an import=yes tag to the changeset, and I'm not sure 
what purpose the end of the comment has. The source is already indicated 
with the source tag, and if you need to track changesets beyond that, 
another tag linking to the import documentation would be better than 
trying to parse the free-form text of the comment tag.

Also, you want to encourage people to use good changeset comments that 
describe what they did, not a bunch of identical comments.

I also found the changeset tag information somewhat buried, I'd 
recommend moving it out of the sub-page

- You're proposing using a coa:place_id tag. There are four issues with 
this. The first is that there seems no confirmation of stability from 
the city, only uniqueness. I've seen a number of cases where an ID that 
people thought was relatively stable turned out not to be.

The second issue with it is that referencing external keys that can't be 
verified is discouraged.

The third is that any future update workflow has to work with objects 
that don't have this key.

The fourth is that history has shown that IDs like this don't get used, 
and tend to bit-rot because of the above reasons. Other imports have 
proposed or have used keys from external sources, and they never got 
used for updates. Do you have concrete plans here?