[Talk-ca] importing GeoBase Data (learning from TIGER)

[Steve Singer]

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008, Sam Vekemans wrote:

> Well, remember (last week i think it was) when OpenStreetMap was shut down
> for maintenance?
> Well, what about convincing the foundation to shut down the server so then
> all the data can be uploaded at once?
> That would fix the problem that you had.  :)

If we want to do a progressive import ( small tile by small tile) then this 
won't work, we aren't talking about one server shutdown but many.  I'm also 
no so sure the rest of the OSM community is keen on outages for data 
imports.    We might be better off writing scripts to detect (and maybe 
fix/revert?) conflicts after the fact.


>
> So a bounding box over the 'complete' areas... or a blanket 'render=no' over
> the whole thing. So it shows 'ghost lines' where the difference is from the
> import to what the users did.

How widely accepted/implemented is the render=no tag? I haven't been 
able to find a wiki page for it. I'm concerned that bulk importing large 
quantities of 'render=no' ways will confuse some of the other programs that 
use OSM data (ie navigation software) particularly if the tag isn't 
typically used for this.

How difficult (in practice) is it to bulk merge data. Something along the 
lines of

*If OSM already contains a way within x meters of what we are importing that 
moves in the same direction and is of the same 'type' then call them the 
same way.

I saw talk on the TIGER discussions about this sort of thing but it wasn't 
clear what they actually implemented (I probably should look at the code)

>
> Hopefully this all makes sense, :)
>
> Cheers,
> Sam Vekemans
> Across Canada Trails
>