[Talk-us] A Friendly Guide to 'Bots and Imports

Katie Filbert filbertk at gmail.com
Thu Aug 5 20:21:10 BST 2010


Bad imports are bad for the osm.  High quality data carefully imported  
is helpful.  If such high quality data is available for us that is as  
good or better than what we can do ourselves, then it's fine not to  
reinvent the wheel. Where it's lower quality data than what we can do  
ourselves, then let's not use it.

The way that CANVEC imports are happening is not bad... someone is  
mass converting the data to osm / josm format and posting the files.  
The CANVEC data is split into tiles.

Then local mappers are to take local tiles (or areas they know) and  
import them, of course checking in josm for already existing features  
and sorting them out.

There is a google doc spreadsheet (not ideal, some nicer tool for this  
would be good but spreadsheet still works) that people can mark areas  
they are working on

The difference with NHD is that we are leaving conversion to osm  
format for the local mapper / importer.  Since OSM US has server  
space, maybe that's good use of it to host converted data ready for  
import.

Leaving imports to local mappers is good.  They are best able to  
assess the quality of the data for that area an care about quality of  
their local map data.   It also leaves "low hanging fruit" for them.  
Some areas without local mappers may take longer to "finish". That is  
okay.

Katie


Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 5, 2010, at 2:52 PM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Nathan Edgars II  
> <neroute2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think the NHD "import" is a good example of a well-intentioned  
> importer
> > (me) gone wrong. I had initially planned to import the whole darn  
> thing in
> > one swoop, but various technical and life challenges came up  
> before I could
> > get it going. While I was working on those issues, people started  
> importing
> > it themselves (sometimes marking so on the wiki, sometimes not).  
> Now that
> > there are some areas imported, the import of the whole dataset  
> becomes
> > infinitely harder because we have to match existing data with new  
> OSM-ified
> > data.
>
> But how is this any different from importing it into an area where
> people have already mapped some lakes from aerials?
>
>
> It isn't any different. I had made the (bad) decision at the time to  
> import over any existing data because in the several hundred places  
> I spot-checked, NHD was vastly superior in resolution (and probably  
> quality).
>
> If we wanted to support imports as a community, a tool like [0]  
> should be the only way of letting imports in to OSM.
>
> [0] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Import_Database#French_Corine_Import_as_Template
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20100805/eb69f1e4/attachment.html>


More information about the Talk-us mailing list