[Talk-us] parcel data in OSM

[Jason Remillard]

Hi,

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> OSM is not data repository, it's a dataset onto itself. Through years
> of experience, and trial and error, we have found that importing these
> external datasets does not help the project in most cases. Therefore
> we propose different solutions to some of the problems.

I don't think this is the majority view.

- Imports are officially allowed. We have a process defined for doing them well.
- Steve Coast, the project founder, just three months ago asked for a
crazy huge import for addresses.
- For where I map (basically one town) 95% of the data was imported by
others. I am perfectly happy about it. There is still tons of mapping
to do.
- If you watch the user stats page, imports are happening every single
day from all over the world.
- The wiki has over 400 pages devoted to imports, many of them focused
on specific import projects.

When 98% of the data in US was already imported, it seems a kind of
late to be even having this discussion. It is really absurd to ask
people who are are interested in imports to go someplace else, when
imports are a huge part of the map in the US (this is talk-us right?),
have been for a long long time, are happening every single day, are
officially allowed, have the support of the majority of the people in
the project, and our founder just three months ago asked for a new
huge import for addresses. Nobody should be getting asked to leave
over this issue.

In 2009, the "open space" layer from MassGIS was imported in
Massachusetts. Most of the landuse=conservation in the state come from
this import. I started mapping this year, noticed the problems, and
decided to fix it. I used my local knowledge (I am a member of one of
the local conservation groups), bing images, walking around,
talking/emailing my neighbors, and the MassGIS L3 parcel data. None of
these sources are 100% correct. The authoritative parcel data is not
available to OSM because of a bad license my town uses. I did my best
to synthesize what I think is the most complete and accurate map of
the conservation land. It has been a ton of work figuring this all out
(10x more work than the building import). As far as I know, OSM is
only place to get this information with a good/liberal license. I
think that most (but not Frederik!) people in the project would agree
that this is a net improvement to the map.

I would also like to point out, I was *not* looking for a huge heated
conversation about the scope of OSM, pushing people off to other
projects, etc when I posted my question. It was just a couple of very
small questions about data that has been in the db since 2009. I am
frustrated that my thread was taken over like this. We should rename
this mailing list "import-fighting-us-plus-frederik".

Bye
Jason.