[Imports] Import of forests, farmland and other types of land cover for Sweden generated from Naturvårdsverkets Nationella Marktäckedata 2018

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Mon Apr 15 20:34:47 UTC 2019


On Sunday 14 April 2019, Grigory Rechistov via Imports wrote:
> Dear OSM community,
> This is an announcement and request for comments, suggestions, and
> approval of land cover information data import for the territory of
> Sweden.
>
> [...]

Had a quick look over your description.

My general recommendation would be not to import any landcover data in 
OSM generated through automated classification of satellite imagery.  
There are multiple reasons for this, the most significant probably is 
that this is inherently incompatible with the tagging system and the 
way how things are mapped in OSM.

Part of this stems from the very idea of closed landcover classification 
systems as not being meant to positively identify certain areas but 
assigning essentially the least unlikely of a set of potential classes 
to every point on the surface.

Another part of this is due to many of the tagging distinctions we have 
in OSM - like natural=wood vs. natural=scrub, natural=scree vs. 
natural=bare_rock, landuse=commercial vs. landuse=industrial or 
leisure=park vs. leisure=garden being indistinguishable based on 
spectral characteristics alone.

Therefore you'd not just be importing data into the existing OSM tagging 
system, you'd import the whole classification system and philosophy 
behind it.

Don't get me wrong - i am not opposed to using automated analysis of 
open data satellite imagery for more efficient mapping in OSM.  This 
has a lot of potential.  But this has to be done specifically for OSM 
and for the tagging and mapping standards we have and it has to be 
controlled by the mapper.  There is no shortcut to this by importing 
data sets created for a completely different purpose with completely 
different goals.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/



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