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

richard at weait.com richard at weait.com
Wed Nov 26 15:44:49 GMT 2008


> 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.

I think asking OSM to shut down so we can play is unlikely to win us
friends.  And I don't think that it is required.  There was much more data
imported from TIGER than we have from GeoBase, and that was done county by
county I believe.

GeoBase tiles may be a rough equivalent in size to the county uploads from
TIGER.  I've emailed one of the TIGER import folks and asked him to join
us here on talk-ca.

I also think that uploading everything and hiding some / all of it is a
bad idea.  We know that tagging for the renderer is sub-optimal and that
things should be tagged "correctly" so that future renderers and editors
will "get it".

Needless duplication of data (say OSM Toronto, plus Toronto on GeoBase) is
wasteful of our resources in terms of database space and bandwidth to
editors.

I also see potential trouble with making additions and changes to any
"overlaid" Toronto data.  Imagine that you spend an afternoon adding bike
routes and bus routes as relations, but didn't notice that half of the
ways you worked on were "render=no".  Or that you did notice and just
changed them to render=yes because of course you want to see your
relations render....

I'm very excited that we have this wonderful data contribution and that we
have such an enthusiastic and energetic group to participate in the
discussion and import.

I think we should take a measured approach and delicate steps.  TIGER took
months to upload, and had at least one false start.  We don't have a
deadline to include the GeoBase data.  Let's find a way to include it that
makes it super easy to accept updates from GeoBase in future (hello, road
names, I'm talking to you).  And let's avoid three or four uploads of
everything, then rollbacks, then uploads again.  Nobody wants to see
Canada rendered then unrendered like a web site that over-uses the < blink
> tag.

Best regards,
Richard






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