[Talk-us-massachusetts] import wiki

[Greg Troxel]

Angela Morley <amorley at protonmail.com> writes:

> Please, feel free to update the wiki. I don't have programming or
> scripting skills, but I can follow policy, so I did what I could to
> help and created the page, and the process I came up with is in
> there. You guys can probably figure out a better way to do this than I
> was playing with. :)

Thanks - I have been editing the wiki just now and am pausing.  I will
feel a little more free to rototill now.

> If I can help in any other way, I'd like to know. If you need data
> verification or something. Not knowing how these tools work is
> slightly frustrating when that's all that imports use.

People looking at the data will be hugely important.  Yes, I realize
that the import business is very program-ish but that's the least-pain
path.  I realize I'm making it sound hard but that's from the school of
watching others get hard knocks, and a long time writing software
professionally.

What will be be really helpful is thinking about all the edge cases and
deciding what to do.  I put some of that in the wiki.  With 2.8M
addresses, even 0.1% irregular is too many to handle by hand.

Someone could check out the address tagging world to figure out how to
deal with 1R and 1 1/2.  Surely we aren't the first and there must be
tons of these in Europe, which has spots that have been full to capacity
for centuries :-)

I did a quick look around my town, and the massgis data looks excellent.
The only thing I noticed was one house which is on a lot labeled
"500-502" and it's 500 in OSM and 502 in MassGIS.  Will have to see
what's right - I bet it's MassGIS.  But we won't be ovewriting, just
producing discrepancy lists for humans.