[Talk-us] MassGIS source/attribution tags

[Greg Troxel]

Lars Ahlzen <lars at ahlzen.com> writes:

> Linear features imported from MassGIS data have the appropriate source=
> and attribution= tags. That makes sense. However, each individual node
> has these identical tags as well, including nodes that have no other tags.
>
> For such nodes with no other tags, this seems redundant. It's a bit
> similar to TLIDs on nodes from the TIGER import (which were removed), i.e:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup/node_tags
>
> Not only does this take extra space, but it complicates editing. JOSM
> (and probably other editors) highlights nodes that have attributes,
> nodes don't get deleted with the parent way, etc.
>
> Is there a good reason to keep such tags around, other than "it takes
> effort to change it"?

I don't think we need attribution tags on nodes which solely exist to be
points in ways.  The attribution request is social and perhaps a bit
legal, not technical, and is more along the lines of "OSM should
acknowledge that it has massgis-based data" than "it should be possible
to determine from the database the provenance of each massgis-derived
object".

I recently suffered from the nodes-remaining-when-way-deleted problem in
JOSM, but didn't realize why at the time.  There aren't too many
massgis-sourced roads that don't exist, but I found one at Cape Cod
Light in North Truro (but then again the whole lighthouse was moved).

So if you are considering writing a bot that does

  for each node in mass

    if the node has only massgis attribution tags, and no others, delete
    the tags (because surely it's either pointless and should be garbage
    collected, or is a member of a way)

then I'd say that sounds good.


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