[Talk-us] natural=* and landuse=* multipolygons at the urban interface

Paul Norman penorman at mac.com
Wed Aug 16 05:39:02 UTC 2017


On 8/15/2017 10:23 AM, OSM Volunteer stevea wrote:
> 1)  Of a geographic value such that they positively further the goals and hew to the tenets of the project,
> 2)  Current or recent, not of a vintage that even as entered do not fully reflect on-the-ground reality right now,
> 3)  Especially if imported, of a scope which, even if large, become structures which conform (<2000 nodes) rather than overwhelm,
> 4)  Free from extraneous key-value pairs which have no reason to be in OSM,
> 5)  Able to last well into the future, or at least until a next update of a newer, better dataset, and
> 6)  A contribution to the depth, richness or correctness of our shared map data, not primarily for the amusement of the contributor.
>
> Unfortunately, I am of the opinion that much data from FMMP imports largely fail all of these.  Paul Norman's brief contribution to this thread may not have teased out the logic of his actions that allowed him to partially remedy the situation, and I don't wish to put words in his mouth, but it seems clear he first reached similar conclusions.

I wouldn't agree with those criteria as exactly phrased, but with the 
spirit, and in general, the imported landuse data in California falls 
short. This isn't why I normally end removing it. I remove what is 
wrong, e.g. landuse=residential in an area with no roads, houses, or 
other structures.

>    I say this that we might understand it is OK for us to conclude there truly are bad data in OSM and we can and should do something about them (delete them, improve them if they have partial value...).

I would prefer a mechanical edit removing the worst of it, but I haven't 
pursued this for three reasons:

- sorting out how to remove the worst mechanically is a fair amount of work,

- I doubt there would be consensus within the US community about 
removing the bad data,

- I'm normally busy with other OSM-related stuff.

Given this, I haven't done any work on it since it would likely be a 
waste of time. Instead I clean it up bit by bit when editing in the 
area. I hope someday there is consensus about a mechanical edit to clean 
it up, as it would vastly improve the editing experience in the region 
and improve OSM data.



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