[Talk-ca] Merging OSM + Geobase

[James Ewen]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 9:10 AM, William Lachance <wrlach at gmail.com> wrote:

> I see the argument of not wanting to blow away people's hard work, but
> from my (admittedly NS-centric view), that approach will lead to severe
> limitations in terms of the quality and consistency of the results. If
> you look at the Halifax region, there's great swathes of OSM data in
> Dartmouth which have no naming information whatsoever. To me it just
> makes no sense to just throw out the rich set of NS geobase data for
> these areas, just because someone did a first pass at mapping it out.

I agree with you here... I am in the process of manually deleting all
of the road data that I entered into Sherwood Park, and Strathcona
County. I did a bunch of manual tracing of roadways from aerial
imagery. I have not physically gone to each street to read the name
off of the signage, so therefore I can not put names on the roads. It
will be quite a while before I can do that. I also traced the rural
roads from poor quality imagery, which means the positional accuracy
is questionable. It will be a long time before I can visit every road
in the county.

Since I am the only mapper working in the county (actually I found
another mapper, but his data was simply horrific), I have been
deleting my work, and have asked for another run through the area with
the script. I would have preferred knowing the scrip was going to be
run, and had the option of deleting the data first, but that
opportunity has passed.

I also would have preferred to peel up the highways that I have
tracked in favour of laying down GeoBase ways, and then going back and
editing the GeoBase ways.

I have the luxury of being able to make these arbitrary decisions
because I am working in isolation, and the decisions only affect work
that I have done. I'm not going to be wiping out the work of others.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that some could argue that
once I enter the data, it no longer belongs to me, but is part of the
creative commons, and belongs to everyone.

I do know, however that it takes almost as long to peel up the
roadways as it did to lay them down in the first place!

James
VE6SRV