[Talk-us] MassGIS building conversion

Jeff Meyer jeff at gwhat.org
Tue Dec 11 07:48:16 GMT 2012


Frederik - one question I have about changeset tags and things like
correspondence tables - how easy will it be for people to discover that
this data even exists? How will they know to look for it? Will they need to
be software developers? For example, will a GIS expert from the state of
Massachusetts who comes across OSM know to look for this information? - Jeff


On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 11:44 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> On 12/11/2012 01:04 AM, Paul Norman wrote:
>
>> Lots of people include IDs because they think they might be useful but
>> very
>> seldom are they actually used.
>>
>
> I can second that. I have witnessed many imports painstakingly preserving
> the ID (because, after all, most of us are IT people and our brains are
> hard-wired to think that ID numbers *must* be useful - you know, you can
> cross reference things and stuff with IDs!) but I've yet to see anyone
> doing something useful with them.
>
> I have never seen anyone who actually imported IDs and had a plan when
> asked - inevitably, the answer was "it might be useful someday, I don't
> know".
>
> Now one of the things we say we want to do is offer data for "unexpected
> uses" so it may sound short-sighted to throw out an ID just because you
> cannot envisage a good use for it at this point in time.
>
> On the other hand, preserving an ID in the database might send the wrong
> signal to mappers. Are they "allowed" to change something that has an
> official GIS ID? What if they split or merge objects that carry such an ID?
> Will their changes be overwritten later if they don't remove the ID? Etc.
>
> My suggestion would be to not import the ID, but create a correspondence
> table during import ("imported object with ID #1234 as way #2345"). Since
> any import has to be properly documented anyway, the list can be stored
> with the other logs/documentation. If one should really want to follow up
> on this later, one can check if the objects still exist and haven't been
> modified, and then update/amend them or do whatever other useful thing the
> ID enables one to do, without polluting the database or puzzling mappers.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
>
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-- 
Jeff Meyer
Global World History Atlas
www.gwhat.org
jeff at gwhat.org
206-676-2347
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