[Talk-ca] Forests/Land Use, was: Canvec reverts

[Begin Daniel]

Why don't we ... burn down all the forests (and the urban areas too)?
Been in Fort-McMurray lately? (Ok it is a bad joke)

Seriously, these discussions about what should be mapped or not, what is valuable content or not are raging since the beginning of OSM. More recently, discussions around the value of hand crafted map compared to imported data are also dividing the community. Those are all ‘normal events’ in a collective work and they will not stop. Best thing to do is sharing your concerns, as you just did. These are seeds that may grow up, or not.

What is very cool with OSM is that you can edit the data. Urban polygon is wrong? Modify it! The definition is obscure in the Wiki? Change it! But yes, the learning curve is often steep, and you may need to discuss with someone else…

Best regard,
Daniel

From: Paul Ramsey [mailto:pramsey at cleverelephant.ca]
Sent: Thursday, 1 September, 2016 11:17
To: Talk-CA OpenStreetMap
Subject: [Talk-ca] Forests/Land Use, was: Canvec reverts

I'm "glad" to see someone else w/ this issue. It's glancingly related to the canvec import issue, since the land use polygons are a source of some of the issues the reverter is complaining about (malformed multipolygons / boundary overlaps).

In my own work in my old home town of Prince George, I've constantly wanted to just plain delete the "urban area" land use polygon (which doesn't seem to correspond in any way to the actual urban area of the present) and the forest polygons (which have the same problem).

Unlike buildings and roads and water, land use is pretty sloppy: where does the "urban area" end? Is this a "forest" or just a bunch of trees? Since anyone making a real multi-scale map will fine some other source of land-use (like classified landsat) and since people trying to map at high-res are finding the forests add little value and much impedance, why don't we ... burn down all the forests (and the urban areas too)?

P

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 6:54 AM, Loïc Haméon <hameonl at gmail.com<mailto:hameonl at gmail.com>> wrote:

On a final note, though, I certainly would approve of any effort to reduce the size of the upload chunks and the assorted polygons. For new mappers like me, those create daunting challenges when trying to make incremental improvements to an area. Shortly after joining the OSM community I was back in my home town of Saint-Félicien, in a fairly remote region that hasn't had tons of local mapping done. Some of the inhabited areas I aimed to improve were covered by Canvec forest multipolygons, and I ended up giving up on them until I could get some more experience as I absolutely did not understand what the hell was going on....
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