[Talk-us-massachusetts] Let's delete MA imported massgis: attributes

[Greg Troxel]

Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 11:02 PM, Jason Remillard <remillard.jason at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Does anybody know what the massgis:way_id is from/for?
>>
>> https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/massgis:way_id#values
>>
>> It's not documented in the wiki , so far I have not been able to figure
>> out where it came from?
>
> ​That's probably a question for someone who helped with the import; maybe
> Lars, Greg, or Calvin remember or remember who.​

crschmidt@ did the import.

I am 99% sure wayid is basically a foreign key into the roads layer.
There is a value, I think 287, that appears on almost all driveways.

> ​(It might be documented on a MASSdot/massGIS website too?)

http://www.mass.gov/anf/research-and-tech/it-serv-and-support/application-serv/office-of-geographic-information-massgis/datalayers/eotroads.html

> I do have a guess, since from the counts shown massgis:way_id is not unique
> ...  I fear the uniqID that i'd like preserved for Provenance is a compound
> key of this and another massgis: key, maybe TownID+WayID or
> CountyID+TownID+WayID.

Perhaps.  There is documentation at the link above.


However, it seems that overall current OSM practice is not to use
foreign keys like this.  While I'm not in the camp that rails against
foreign keys as evil, I also think they aren't really useful because
there will be roads in OSM not from MassGIS, and we really need to be
able to do a conflation/diff, disregarding the way-id field.  So it
might as well be missing entirely.

So:

  If someone wants to propose an automated edit to drop the way_id
  field, I'm ok with that.   But I also don't think removing way_id is
  important enough that I'd want to work on it.

Longer term:

   We should look into all the other fields, see if they are right, and
   perhaps have an automated edit to update them to current if they have
   not been changed by a human since import.  In particular condition
   (changes) and width (possible units issue).

   There is now a 911 addressing layer.  I am 95% sure it is PD like the
   rest, and we could ask.  Applying even most of it would be a huge
   improvement in map quality/usefulness.
   
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