[Talk-us-massachusetts] Talk-us-massachusetts Digest, Vol 45, Issue 2

[Greg Troxel]

Yury Yatsynovich <yury.yatsynovich at gmail.com> writes:

[setting aside for now the serious issue of the group having a consensus
and respecting it]

> In addition, although, MassGIS boundaries are of very fine quality, why OSM
> should be a clone of MassGIS? If a river/border section in OSM is mapped in
> finer details, why should the priority be given to a coarser geometry
> imported from MassGIS?

Part of the issue is that the town bounarides are a legal thing, and we
are not surveyors.  Even with the notion of the law saying a boundary
follows the river, there is still the issue of who decides where the
river is, and if the legal boundary is as the river was determined by
some particular party, and recorded someplace.  I brought this up before
and you seem to be ignoring it.

There is also the issue of how anyone in OSM is determining where river
is.  We have imagery which is misaligned, and we don't know what the
water level was when it was taken.  The law as I understand it talks
about midpoint of water, and I don't think you can see that from
imagery.