[Talk-ca] Re : Administrative Boundary

[Pierre Béland]

Richard,

OSM is surely an ambitious project with many pitfalls along the way.  We are an Open organization with people having various 
computer and mapping experiences. I think that the Talk-ca list role is 
more to try offering guidelines and priorities. Either importing data or GPS traces, people may make mistakes. Should we offer more training 
then? Find ways to recruit more people? Prior to that, maybe we should 
assure to offer appealing OSM products, easily accessible (ie. Maps, GPS Imports).


Nominatim searches are central to OpenStreetMap. We should then make particular efforts to import boundary data.  And this task should 
surely be done only by people having enough mapping experience to do 
it.  It is not an easy task. It is why I suggest that we explore ways of doing it.
I would suggest Daniel to produce one 
boundary OSM file for each province. And we should look locally the best
 way to import it in OSM.
 
Pierre 



________________________________
 De : Richard Weait <richard at weait.com>
À : Talk-CA OpenStreetMap <talk-ca at openstreetmap.org> 
Envoyé le : Mercredi 21 mars 2012 0h44
Objet : Re: [Talk-ca] Re : Administrative Boundary
 

I'd like to suggest that we stop "importing", and start "referring to
external sources".  Here's the key difference:

You map one object at a time while referring to external sources.  So
you can give each object the attention it needs.  imports drop large
numbers of object into the DB at one time.  Each of that group of
objects only gets a small share of your attention.

I recently added municipal boundaries from Waterloo Region to OSM and
wrote up the experience.

http://opendataexpert.com/2012/using-waterloo-region-open-data/

It was a relatively long process, even though there were no existing
boundaries for the region.  Each boundary had to be reconciled with
those of surrounding regions.

It's great to
 have external sources.  We have several of them to
consider including aerial imagery, NRCan data, perhaps city data and
more.  We also have our local knowledge, survey track files, notes and
photographs.  And none of them agree 100% with each other.  :-)  All
of our sources are lying to us and we have to make an educated
judgment about what the best answer might be, given conflicting
sources.

It makes no sense to discard our good judgment, merely to accurately
duplicate the errors of a single source.  :-)

So let's stop "importing" and start using external sources in smarter ways.

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