[OSM-talk] Notability (was openstreetmap)

[Karl Newman]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 3:14 PM, Andrew MacKinnon <andrewpmk at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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 get out of date very quickly unless they're prepared to return and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 As for out-of-date data, OSM is a wiki, so it is the responsibility of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.
>

I agree--some sort of system to elide data that's more special-interest is
going to be necessary eventually, otherwise editing will be impossible. I've
come across some parcel map shapefiles for a few counties here in the US
(I'm sure a lot of counties have it available), but that data would really
get in the way of editing roads, so I haven't pursued importing them.

Karl
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