[Talk-ca] Lake of the Woods

[Richard Degelder]

Hello Samuel,

I would encourage you to continue mapping whatever you want.  When we do
the import it is very unlikely that we would be considering replacing
work that was already entered by OSM users.  We are trying to find the
most efficient way to augment the work done by users with the GeoBase
data sets.

As for the fact that part of the lake lies within the United States may
pose a bit of a problem.  When there is a feature that crosses
provincial/territorial borders all jurisdictions must agree to the
naming and other attributes of that feature.  I am not sure about when
it crosses an International border, although I doubt that the name would
be disputed.  Maybe you will want to get the US side of the shoreline as
well to ensure that it is correct, although that will be a lot of work.

At some point you may want to edit the work you have done already on the
shoreline for the lake, especially if you are unhappy with it.  Once we
have the hydrological import complete you can revisit your work, which
should still exist, and see if you want to use the hydrological import
to improve what you already did or to leave it.

At this point the exact mechanisms for the import are still to be
determined and so any suggestions at this point are very welcome.  Any
effort to make the import happen are even more welcome and in so doing
you will have a greater impact on exactly what will occur.  

There is likely to be a fair amount of work involved to make any of the
features we want as part of any import work.  As much as we are going to
have to automate the import process not everything will be able to be
done with import scripts.  At some point with any of the imports there
is likely to be some intervention by the regular users to clean up the
data.  We would, hopefully keep the amount of hand editing to a minimum,
this country is just to large to want to do a great deal.

Sam, one point though.  I noticed that with the TIGER import for the
lower Great Lakes area the import marked the border at the edges of the
shoreline rather than in the middle of the lakes as it should be.  I do
not know if the same is true with Lake of the Woods but check it out.
If the Tiger import did the same there it might give a pretty good
approximation of the shoreline of the lake, at least within the US.  If
the GeoBase hydrological import only goes to the border then it might be
possible to approximate the rest of the shoreline from the TIGER import
using the border as the shoreline.

When Michel Gilbert did his, temporary, import of the Geopolitical
boundaries he had the international border located accurately.  That
will be imported again when he is ready to do so.

Richard Degelder