[Imports] Import user required or not for manual import work?

[Anders Torger]

Hello,

I have a question about formalities around manual imports, specifically 
when an import user account is required.

The Swedish NVDB import which we look at formalizing now is generally 
not to cover new ground, ~90% of roads already exist, but to refresh 
existing geometry and enrich/update tags and correct the many positional 
errors that exist, and of course be able to say that 100% of our 
nationally documented roads also exist in OSM with just as good 
precision.

A script exists to convert NVDB shape files to an OSM layer. No 
automation exist for actually getting it into the OSM database though, 
that's a normal JOSM workflow, and includes several manual steps to 
adjust certain things in the script-converted layers that the NVDB data 
can't get right, mainly the OSM highway type and bridges/tunnels, but 
also adding things like turning circles and fixing quirks that may 
appear in naming.

While the external database provides road geometry, quite often more 
modifications is done to existing nature and buildings as these often 
have considerable alignment errors and need to be realigned to match 
correctly aligned roads. All this is done manually of course.

The work-intensive merging process with many adjustment of new and old 
means that compared to mapping work where you nowadays typically trace 
the NVDB roads by hand from the raster layer (which exits pre-loaded in 
JOSM and has better positional alignment than available aerials) the 
speed is about 5 - 10 times faster with better precision. Change sets 
become the same as with manual mapping, ie multiple small areas that 
come at a slow rate. Personally I would do about 100 - 200 road segments 
per changeset, and 1 - 5 changesets per day, which means 15 - 30 days 
for a normal sized municipality (there are 290 municipalities in 
Sweden). While I sometimes do mapping marathons with a high number of 
changesets per day, if I would do everything myself it would still take 
about 10 - 15 years to go through Sweden.

The import aspect of it is tags like maxspeed, access restrictions, 
oneway etc which you can't see on aerials or the raster representation.

While the import process needs formal approval, I still don't really see 
this process as a typical import, but rather a way to speed up what is 
already done manually (there are several examples of Swedish mappers 
using NVDB data on their own already to speed up their personal mapping, 
and this is already widely accepted).

What I wanted to get to is that I don't see the need to use a specific 
import user for this type of work. It's so manual, and it's so 
intertwined and overlapping with normal maintenance work, and the NVDB 
geometry already exist in raster form in JOSM and is widely used even by 
casual iD mappers. What do you think?

/Anders