[Imports] Fwd: Importing West Virginia State Forests Boundary

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 16:21 2021-08-11, Kevin Kenny đã viết:
> Note that I avoided conflation with municipal boundaries because (a) 
> TIGER doesn't have them all right, and (b) the surveys that laid down 
> the townships were often quite primitive, and substantial errors of 
> closure exist to this day.  There's no guarantee that the borders align, 
> which is my criterion for conflating shared ways.  Similarly I refrain 
> from conflation with shoreline unless I understand that there's a true 
> "the land ends where the water begins" status. (There is such a thing in 
> some of these cases, because the upstream database that I'm using 
> represents "Forest preserve land under water" as a separate landuse, and 
> I know that in that case, the actual shoreline governs, since the 
> landowner of the shore is the landowner of the water.)
> 
> I believe anecdotally that the preference for shared ways vs. redrawn 
> boundaries is correlated with the mappers' choice of software tools. 
> Those who use the more powerful but user-hostile JOSM are more amenable 
> to multipolygons with shared outer ways than those who use more 
> approachable but less comprehensive tools.  (I fully concede that JOSM 
> is bug-ugly and has a pretty impenetrable user interface; I use it for 
> its power, and because I'm accustomed to discovering functionality by 
> spelunking the inverted-L menu format, now regarded as unstylish.)

I agree with your observation that there's a correlation to the tools 
being used, and I'm not about to insist that JOSM users abandon their 
familiar workflows in favor of mine. But whereas I wouldn't get on your 
case about the multipolygons you've thoughtfully created, I do find it 
problematic to suggest that any landuse _import_ should create a 
multipolygon out of every landuse area that happens to touch another.

In some terrains, a landuse import lays down inherently complex 
geometries that a new mapper may find challenging. But if an import were 
to densely blanket the region in an less intuitive data type, then 
casual contributors would either find OSM formidable to edit or they 
would edit around the landuse areas without maintaining them, a loss for 
the project either way.

In my opinion, critiquing a landuse import based on its lack of 
multipolygons would be inconsistent with promoting a positive experience 
for non-importers. Fortunately, a relation-heavy approach was not taken 
in Rhode Island, nor in any other U.S. landuse import that I'm aware of, 
nor in plenty of craft mapping, making it even more puzzling that it 
came up in the context of this boundary import.

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us