[OSM-talk] Adding vmap0 road data to OSM

[Bruce Cowan]

On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 09:37 +0100, Igor Brejc wrote:
> Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> > I think that the important thing in this case is not "Do we import it or
> > do we not import it" -- there's no reason that having low resolution
> > data hurts OSM so long as it is properly labelled. 
> That sounds fine, but the problem is that the moment vmap0 data is added 
> to the OSM database, it becomes equal with the existing data. Just 
> tagging vmap0 data is not enough: anyone could delete these tags 
> afterwards and the thing will slowly turn into chaos. Currently when you 
> look at some area of the OSM map and you see roads, you can be pretty 
> sure that someone has used GPS or satellite images to trace it (okey, 
> with TIGER data in US this is not true). But after a whole lot of new 
> data is imported from some other source, how will anyone be able to 
> distinguish between traced (presumably high-quality) and imported (in 
> this case low-quality) data?

This is probably a problem with TIGER data as well, as it can be pretty
inaccurate. On seeing an area with roads, someone might think "oh, it's
done, I won't bother doing anything here", even though the data is
wrong/inaccurate. This probably wouldn't be the case with vmap0 though.

The likely outcome of someone seeing vmap0 roads would be deletion of
them, as it would be very difficult to edit them into shape (Judging by
X-Plane data, it has 1 node per mile around here).

When I first started, there was a major road not far from here which was
presumably landsat derived, which I aimed to connect to.

If only OSM had multiple databases, one for each source (GPS, TIGER,
Yahoo, landsat, OAM, vmap0), then conflicts wouldn't be as much of a
problem (I'm referring mainly to TIGER data where people had already
been mapping).

As per usual, I can see both sides of the argument, which is rather
annoying.
-- 
Bruce Cowan <bcowan at fastmail.co.uk>