[talk-au] Filling in blank space (Was Re: Tagging towns by relative importance, not just population size)

[cleary]

The United States (at federal level and many states too) have laws providing that, if government/public money is spent collecting data, then the data should be released free of copyright restrictions in the public domain. (An admirable approach in my view.)  During World War Two, the American defence forces in Australia undertook detailed mapping for anticipated military use if required, especially if our country was invaded. They paid special attention to railways, roads, and other infrastructure useful to an army or an enemy. Those were the places that were shown on the maps.  Since most other map data was restricted by severe copyrights, the public domain American military maps provided much data for maps published in the following decades.  My guess is that this was the data sourced for the 1957 National Geographic Map. I think Trida was once a rail junction linking the Riverina with the Broken Hill/transcontinental railway line. 

About a decade ago I attended the launch of an atlas, touted at the time as the physically largest such book ever published in Australia and a limited edition was available for $100,000 with physically smaller versions available at lower prices. I attended a launching ceremony at the State Library of NSW when the publisher satisfied the legal requirement to deposit a copy of the publication with  the state library.  The big book was glossy and pretty, but very large and heavy and needed two people to turn a page. The content was based on the newest non-copyright data that the publisher could source  -  you guessed it! They used United States military World War Two data.  I remember a very big dot on the map for Coongoola in Queensland. It used to be on a railway line but I don't know how many buildings it had. (Apparently it was considered important if military equipment from southern states needed to the sent to North Queensland in the even of an invasion.) And that data was being published here in Australia as recently as about 10 years ago, and showing Coongoola as a significant Australian town!  When I travelled through Coongoola several years ago, there was just a bus stop with a shelter shed and some surrounding farms. 

Seeing a relatively-recent atlas with such obsolete data reinforced my love of OSM and my desire to keep it both current and accurate.  






On Sun, 1 Oct 2023, at 10:22 AM, Andrew Davidson wrote:
> On 29/9/23 20:22, Warin wrote:
>
>> I did meet some English 4WD world travellers that had a world map. In the 
>> north west corner of Australia was Carnegie on that map .. it is a 
>> cattle station, has fuel and might do some food if you ask. It is a fair 
>> way to the next places with fuel. It was on their map so they went. Such 
>> is the power of 'filling in the blank spaces'.
>
> It is interesting to look at world maps and looking at what gets put in 
> for Australia compared to elsewhere. Check out this 1957 Nat Geo maps 
> and see how many of the AU place names you even recognise:
>
> https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-548412715/view
>
> Trida? Not even in OSM.
>
>
>
>
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