[Talk-ca] Formal proposal to replace the existing Ottawa information with Geobase information.

[James Ewen]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 7:52 AM, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is purely local and it does not impact any other parts of Canada.

On the contrary, OSM is a worldwide community, and what you do can
have an impact on others, other parts of Ontario, other parts of
Canada, and other parts of the world. We share information with many
other groups.

>  If you have been involved in creating the existing map and have input
> please input it now.  I'm under the impression that locally so far
> there is not a major community effort going on with map parties etc
> which would be disrupted by this action.

I've been involved in creating the map... nothing within the confines
of greater Ottawa, but if need be, I can edit a road in Ottawa to meet
your criteria. You are asking for input from other mappers, and are
getting input. If you decide to ignore the input from other mappers,
and wholesale wipe out OSM data to clear the way for a bulk import,
you'll be setting a very important precedent that WILL have an impact
outside of the confines of your editing area.

If you delete all the work that has been done up until now, you
seriously risk alienating the users that have been busy creating the
Ottawa map so far. You also risk causing repercussions throughout the
OSM community where people will be leery of investing the time and
effort to contribute to the OSM map when some individual may in the
future decide that the data is "of dubious quality", and simply bulk
delete the data in favour of a bulk import from their favourite
source.

> The reasoning behind this proposal is the road data sampled so far
> seems to be of dubious quality.

Can you provide examples? I had a quick look around downtown Ottawa,
and it looks to be fairly well mapped.

> I suggest that if there is no local objection within 30 days that
> implement this.

What criteria will you accept as an objection? Have you contacted
every one of the people that have worked on creating the Ottawa map?
There is no requirement that OSM mappers have to belong to this
reflector.

Don't toss this out as simply a person trying to be a pain in your
backside. I mapped some of Fort McMurray before the import scripts
were created. Fort McMurray was actually used as a test bed for the
scripts to see how the roadmatcher was working. I actually wanted to
delete all of the roads in Fort McMurray to be able to get a nice
uniform import. As I was the only person mapping in Fort McMurray, I
felt that I would be able to remove my ways without repercussion.

You have to remember that once you enter the information into the
database, it does not belong to you (the individual), but it becomes
your property (as part of the OSM community). You would essentially be
destroying data that belongs to the community.

I understand what you want to do, and why you want to do it, but the
manner in which you do it is the issue.

James
VE6SRV