[Talk-ca] cleaning up after the GeoBase import

[William Lachance]

On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 13:10 -0600, James Ewen wrote:
> 
> Since GeoBase stores every road segment between junctions as
> individual ways, and OSM and GeoBase could potentially be sharing data
> in both directions, then we need to try and keep the data structure as
> compatible as possible.

I have to say that as someone who uses OSM data in my own projects, I
really don't like the idea of creating our own "OSM-CA" mapping and
tagging conventions. Do we really want to be formatting our OSM data
differently from international conventions? This basically amounts to
asking everyone who writes tools/products that read/write OSM data
(which go far beyond the OSMARender and Potlatch editor, see for example
the developer tools at http://cloudmade.com) to accomodate us. If every
country were to do this, writing useful software and tools that use
OpenStreetMap information would quickly become unmanageable. I strongly
believe that our only chance of making OpenStreetMap broadly useful is
to conform to the international conventions on tagging/formatting the
data.

As others have pointed out, it should be possible to retroactively run
tools like roadmatcher (or custom python scripts like the one I wrote
several months ago:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/2009-April/001001.html)
on the imported data as it changes. Likewise, we should be mostly able
to import things like address information using some kind of bulk import
process that matches on geometry. What's mostly needed is people with
the time and persistence to step up to the plate (I apologize for not
being able to do so myself-- hopefully I'll have more time to work on my
tools sometime later in the summer).
-- 
William Lachance <wrlach at gmail.com>