[Talk-us] Regional Street Centerline Solution - Minneapolis- St. Paul metro area - RFP

[Alan Millar]

> Hi talk-us: For those of you who might have skipped over this simply
> because it seems difficult to do, I ask that you at least skim over the
> sections in Exhibit 1 of the PDF. As OSM gets more attention from groups
> interested in using it, it's important to realize that the things
requested
> in this PDF aren't all that crazy and probably would make for a good
source
> of ideas for improvements to OSM's infrastructure.

I agree. It is a very interesting idea, and yes, it does sound difficult,
and also compelling for good improvements.  

In the near term, I personally have a hard time picturing "the community"
maintaining the detailed rigor that would be required to meet the Metro's
needs.  In particular, OSM ways can be split and combined quite easily as
needed for OSM usage, but this is a data nightmare for cross-referencing to
other data sets.

   Bunch of TIGER lines
 + combine into one OSM way with a string of TLIDs in a tag
 + move, add, delete nodes to align with misc aerial photos
 - split way at every turn restriction and speed limit change or lane
count change
 = cross-reference barf...

While I like the general idea that OSM forgoes the traditional GIS layers
in favor of the tag free-for-all, this is one of those times where the hard
segmentation of data is probably necessary.  You would need some serious
edit controls to make it effective.

Adjunct databases would seem to be necessary to maintain this.  Look at
TopOSM; sheer beauty.  Anyone notice that US address search *IS* available
on maps.cloudmade.com?  Hmmm...  (I'm hoping open mapquest does the same,
too.)

Having said all that, I *love* the idea of TIGER lines imported into OSM,
getting cleaned up, being supplied back to Metro, to be fed back to the
Census Bureau.  I hope somebody can pull this off.

This seems like an excellent project for a small OSM-savvy professional
firm, or Cloudmade, or similar. Maybe AOL wants to start a patch.com branch
in Minneapolis along with an open mapquest project.

- Alan

--
Alan Millar       am12 at bolis.com