[talk-au] Fwd: Re: [OSM-talk] Why PD is not better for business

[James Livingston]

On 11/12/2009, at 8:02 PM, Elizabeth Dodd wrote:
> so we don't need imported data?

In most cases we don't need imported data, but it can be useful. For example rather than painstakingly crafting the entire coastline of Australia from a few GPS traces and a lot of imagery (much is relatively inaccessible), we can import it from someone's dataset and spend that large amount of time doing other things to improve OSM that we can't import data for.

There are also some things where importing external datasets is the *only* way to get it into OSM. For example boundaries of areas that have no physical edge, just a (not necessarily straight) line on someone decided on at some point in time.