[Talk-us] Anyone ever talked about adding more Land Ownership data to OSM?

[Minh Nguyen]

On 2013-01-08 3:13 AM, Serge Wroclawski wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 12:40 AM, Jeff Meyer <jeff at gwhat.org> wrote:
>
>> All of the rules about observability and verifiability apply to country and
>> state borders, as well, as Mike states, but we include them and somehow
>> improve them.
>
> We do include them, and as I've said, they've been a source of agita.
>
> We simply can't improve state or municipal boundries.

Well, I am.

While filling in townships in the Greater Cincinnati area, I've also 
been working on TIGER's rather artful interpretation of the area's 
municipal boundaries, motivated by the Mapnik style's prominent 
rendering of them. The boundaries are full of things like triangular 
enclave artifacts and diagonal jogs right through residential lots. But 
the ways are usually suggestive enough of the correct boundaries that I 
can align them to edges of subdivisions and join them to road centerlines.

Before the TIGER boundary import, I had mapped one small suburb's city 
limits and had no intention of going further. It was tough work, because 
my local knowledge was limited to the locations of welcome signs. With 
the TIGER data, someone with that level of knowledge can actually 
improve the map. I'm not under the illusion that every city in America 
has mappers willing to do this work, or that these adjustments are even 
possible in rural areas. But if the people who imported these boundaries 
had listened to reason, OSM would've wound up with virtually no 
boundaries instead of some good and some bad.

For reference, Google Maps uses the same TIGER data, but just for 
rendering cities with a very faint fill. AFAICT, Map Maker doesn't allow 
you to edit these boundaries, while of course OSM does, so here's an 
example of OSM playing to its crowdsourcing strengths.

-- 
Minh Nguyen <mxn at 1ec5.org>
Jabber: mxn at 1ec5.org; Blog: http://notes.1ec5.org/