[OSM-talk] Notability (was openstreetmap)

[Andrew MacKinnon]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 8:00 AM, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
> Nic Roets wrote:
>
>> If someone made the effort to physically survey it and properly tag
>> it, I think it's OK.
>
> Maintainability is probably a bigger issue than notability. Roads,
> railways and canals don't move much, rivers hardly at all - we can
> cope with maintaining that sort of database.
>
> But where people have gone into vast amounts of detail on something
> that changes rapidly, such as shops on a High Street, the data will
> get out of date very quickly unless they're prepared to return and
> resurvey frequently. Here's an example (fortunately not rendered by
> any of the main renderers): http://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?
> lat=51.70619&lon=-0.61222&zoom=17

I think this would be best done by implementing some sort of "layers"
in OSM. Suppose that general-interest data is tagged without a prefix.
Specialist data can be tagged with a prefix, e.g.
"category:key=value". Then, editors, renderers and output plugins
could filter out unwanted data using an API call (like the filters in
osmxapi) so that they don't waste time downloading it. I see nothing
wrong with putting specialized data in the main database as long as
there is an easy way to filter it out if the user doesn't want it.
Splitting data into multiple databases seems unnecessary.

As for out-of-date data, OSM is a wiki, so it is the responsibility of
the person who put in the data or subsequent passers-by to correct it.
As long as the data doesn't change extremely frequently (like daily or
weekly), I think it is OK to put it in the main database.