[Talk-us] Fresno castradal imports

[Alan Mintz]

At 2012-05-04 14:25, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>On 05/04/2012 11:11 PM, Brett Lord-Casitllo wrote:
>>Excuse me, but what is your foundation for declaring cadastral data
>>"useless" in OSM?
>>Where does it say that OSM is just for roads, addresses, and geocoding?
>>As someone that uses OSM for disaster response, cadastral data, even
>>outdated cadastral data, is a godsend when it is available.
>
>The problem is that you are mixing up the questions of "is data useful 
>generally", and "is data useful in OSM".
>
>You can sure as hell make a very useful map by, say, firing up TileMill 
>and taking an OSM base layer and overlaying the cadastral shapefiles from 
>whatever disaster area you are working in. If these shapefiles are not 
>readily available, then one should create some kind of repository or 
>catalogue that makes them so.

Exactly. The shapefiles and such are generally readily available - that's 
how these imports originate - someone downloads the files from the 
state/county/city. In the case of an emergency, I can turn a shapefile into 
OSM XML, KML, or whatever in an hour or two, and there are plenty of 
technologies and sites out there that can layer that with whatever basemap 
you like (including OSM). The data would be far more current than anything 
imported into OSM and left there to be updated sometime (or never, as 
experience has shown). Keeping such data backed up and available is a 
trivial part of its custodian's (paid) job - they don't need us to help them.

--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>