[Talk-us] Fresno castradal imports

[Brett Lord-Casitllo]

"OSM is not a giant collection bowl for data ("oh look I've found a scrap of data on my city's web site, let's upload that to OSM so that it don't get lost!!!").
 OSM is a giant *editor*. OSM is for *editing* data."

I strongly disagree. OSM is for the user, not for the editor. OSM -is- a giant collection bowl for data. It exists to allow access to data that might otherwise be inaccessible. Crowdsourcing is the means, not the ends.

"Anything that is surveyed and that can be updated by normal citizens can benefit from being in OSM; where people survey such data and put it in into OSM, they open the data up for the helping hands of others."

The very foundation of cadastral data is ground survey. I know from experience that most GIS cadastral data is obtained by heads up digitizing, not from original documents. It is actually an ideal area for crowdsourcing. Interested users can access original documents and reconstruct the boundaries correctly and at much greater accuracy than the cities.
(Incidentally, normally there is no "authoritative" source for GIS cadastral data in the US, and where there is an authoritative source, it is not the cities but rather the counties. What the city of Fresno provides is no more authoritative than anything drawn by an OSM user using recorded deeds.)
--Brett
Brett Lord-Castillo
Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
St. Louis County Police
Office of Emergency Management
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