[talk-au] Introducing myself and I have a question too

[Ian Sergeant]

On 8 August 2012 17:03, Matthew Landauer <matthew at openaustralia.org> wrote:

> As far as I understand the LGA boundaries totally fit within what OSM
> should provide, doesn't it?
>
>
Well, there is a school of thought that says that data that is fully
external to OSM, and is updated on a fairly regular basis by a third
parties there is limited value in performing an import into OSM.

The data in OSM quickly gets out of date, and updating it once it has been
modified and integrated with other OSM data can be hard - near
intractable.  Ultimately, it is easy to import data into OSM.  Much harder
to maintain it

The problem being OSM doesn't have a good method right now of supporting
layers of separated data.  Projects like Common Map are looking at this
issue (lots of separate data sets with a common schema).  It is yet to be
seen if the solution lies there.

That said, I'm personally happy to move forward with importing the boundary
data.  Mainly because it is important for the map, and we have no other way
of supporting it.  But I think we need to look carefully for any lessons we
learned from the ABS_2006 suburb import before we do.  We never did figure
out whether we were importing actual boundaries that could be corrected or
whether the import was what it was and shouldn't change.  We never agreed
on whether they should be moved to align with coastline and other features
when it looked like they were incorrect.  We never had a process to update
the information when new external data became available.  We had many ugly
maps with coastline and boundaries overlaid and crossing.

We did have the benefit of using the boundary data where it aligned with
some natural features, although I get the feeling with better Bing and AGRI
data the value of that is diminishing.

Ian.
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