[Talk-GB] Open data (Was: Parliamentary debate mentions OSM)
John Aldridge
jpsa at cantab.net
Tue Mar 29 09:46:21 UTC 2016
On 29-Mar-16 10:19, Rob Nickerson wrote:
> Should we attempt to include everything that is in the open data
> datasets plus our on the ground additions (manually or, unless we
> suddenly get many more mappers, by some form of controlled merge) or
> should we leave the end users with the task of mixing OSM with the open
> data?
I'm generally not in favour of importing 'definitive' data from other
sources, and it would be better to have some dynamic overlay procedure
(which must of course available to normal end-users of the map on
www.openstreetmap.org, not just to sophisticated OSM data processors).
An example is parish boundaries which, I understand, have been imported
from Ordnance Survey data. The problem with these are that they often
get inadvertently corrupted in OSM: they tend to lie along other
features, which means that it's rather easy to get them inadvertently to
share nodes, which in turn ends up with them being dragged around by
mistake.
I appreciate that we don't have such a dynamic overlay procedure, and
nor do I have a solution to offer, but the problem is real: if we import
data which is definitively specified elsewhere, we are pretty much
guaranteeing that OSM's version of that data will be inferior to other
mapping, even if only because it'll get out of date.
I suppose a satisfactory alternative to dynamic overlay would be if any
such import were required to have an automated procedure for adopting
regular updates from the definitive source.
--
Cheers,
John
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