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

[Yantisa Akhadi]

Hi Anders,

Hmm...others may have better suggestions, but in my opinion, this sounds
like an Organized Editing activity. You can read more about it here:
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Organised_Editing_Guidelines

Best,
Iyan

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 5:28 PM Anders Torger <anders at torger.se> wrote:

> 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
>
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