[Talk-ca] cleaning up after the GeoBase import

[James Ewen]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Richard Weait<richard at weait.com> wrote:

> OpenStreetMap
> It's fun.  It's free.  You can help.

If I have to make 5000 individual edits to change one attribute on a
roadway, then it's no longer fun.

This is where my concern lies. There are lots of places where I would
like to make changes and updates, but I do not have the time necessary
to make the changes to all of the segments that define the way any
longer. I used to be able to edit a road in a couple minutes, now that
same road may take twenty to thirty minutes to make that same change,
because of the number of segments involved.

I would also like to know your opinion on what we do with the existing
OSM ways that do not have GeoBase UUIDs. I hear the argument that we
must leave the UUIDs in place so that we can match up against future
GeoBase updates. How do we match the existing OSM data to those future
GeoBase updates? Do we just ignore the portions of the OSM database
that have been contributed by real people?

We say that real people data gets priority over GeoBase automated
imports. What if I want to track more GPS traces that I have acquired?
Can I do that, converting the GPS traces to ways, and remove the
GeoBase data? I'm a real person, so I get priority, but if I delete
GeoBase data (and UUIDs), then am I a vandal?

I like the idea of keeping the data in a manner that is similar to
GeoBase, but if we do, then we need to make the editing tools smarter,
to make the maintenance job easier. How do our friends at GeoBase deal
with such a fragmented database? Just a room full of monkeys banging
away at the database, or fancy tools that make it easy to manipulate
the data.

I sure like being able to poke around Alberta and have little lines
show up all over the place, rather than the vast expanses of nothing
that used to be there. We've got the data, but it can be a little
overwhelming to try and deal with all of it. I remember when I could
edit every way in Alberta within 20 minutes!

I even had a peek at Cranbrook (where I have done a little mapping, as
well as getting my sister involved), and have seen what Sam is
preaching about. There's some good data in the CanVec database which
adds some flesh to the GeoBase skeleton.

James
VE6SRV