[talk-au] CC-BY-A data released for Victoria

[John Smith]

I think things are being blown out of proportion about duplicates,
points of interest is one thing that OSM can excel at, but the point
itself is only part of the data, I think the meta information is more
important and a lot of this information simply isn't being collected
at present by most mappers.

I think that duplicates are more likely to occur in metro areas, which
if you take into account the availablity of hi-res imagery is usually
a trivial matter to merge. On the other hand most rural areas are to
varying degrees a blank canvas, unless there is 1 or more avid mappers
in the region.

So I have no regrets over previous imports, but I think making OSM
files available to anyone and everyone is a bad idea simply because it
only takes a couple of overly zealous mappers or people with malice
and we really will have a problem on our hands.

The question then is what to do about data sources becoming available.
Simply ignoring them is a mistake because of the additional
information they can provide that doesn't exist, there is also a lot
of people once shown how could be very useful in collating disparate
data sets the question is how to make datasets available in a useful
way to people that are going to do useful things with them without
being too overly protective.

If the majority on this list think a compromise is in order, a
possible way to achieve this might be to split the data up into
metro/non-metro chunks and import the non-metro and make the metro
available to interested parties only on request.

In any case I don't think I'll be making future datasets available, I
will either import it myself or hand out the data on a per request
basis, or just leave it up to others to deal with.