[Talk-us] Admin borders in the US

[Martijn van Exel]

Agreed that we should not, under no circumstances, just go ahead and
remove data from OSM that has been there for a long time, that people
rely on. And that is not what I am proposing. Really, I am not
proposing anything, I am just stating my opinion that authoritative
data such as boundaries, for which a freely available resource exists,
and which are not easily verifiable through surveying methods at our
disposal, have no place in OSM. If it were up to me, we'd set up a
data service (be it WFS, geojson or whatever floats our boat), make
sure that service always has the latest data, (I'm sure we could work
with Census to make this happen) and call that service as needed for
tile generation, API calls, etc. It's a variation on your multi layer
approach, I guess.

On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net> wrote:
> On 11/3/13 12:17 PM, Martijn van Exel wrote:
>> Administrative boundaries are generally not verifiable by ground
>> surveying, and are not straightforward to edit. This causes
>> information rot. What good is administrative boundary information that
>> are not trustworthy? Moreover, they are freely[1] and easily available
>> from an authoritative source. For all these reasons combined, I would
>> favor them not being in OSM at all.
>>
> on the other hand, people expect to see at least some of these
> boundaries in a map, and apps like Nominatum and various
> GPS apps (OsmAnd being one) use them.
>
> i understand your point of view, but removing them will be
> very disruptive to a bunch of important data consumers.
>
> what i favor is going to a multi layer approach where some
> layers of OSM are ground verifiable things and others may
> not be. a consumer could choose to use some layers, and
> the admin boundaries (which are a real problem) can be
> moved and we can consider how to approach them differently
> because what we're doing now isn't working real well.
>
> richard
>
>
>
>



-- 
Martijn van Exel
http://oegeo.wordpress.com/
http://openstreetmap.us/