[OSM-talk] authorization to import Lombardy data in OSM

[Jukka Rahkonen]

Simone Cortesi <simone <at> cortesi.com> writes:

> 
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 1:11 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik
 <at> remote.org> wrote:
> 
> > Information about that information goes into the changeset: 
> > Why do we known,
> > how did we measure, who gave us permission, and what music 
> > did we hear
> > during out editing session.
> 
> I think you are right, adding information to the changeset will be enough.

What happens if the Regional Administration of Lombardy would some day offer  a
major update to the data to be imported now?  Can the imported features be
identified later so that they could be updated or deleted+inserted again? 
Update should naturally happen automatically only if no OSM user has touched the
feature after initial import.

I think that guidelines for updating imported data comes more and more
important.  We have already imports from AND, Tiger, Canadian, German and
African sources, French cadastre, Estonian city data, Italian data, MassGIS etc.
OSM is not at all just user contributed data.  Perhaps it could be better
described as a collection of user contributed imported data enhanced by users.

Great deal of the imported data is maintained by the original data providers. It
would be a waste of OSM resources not to take the updates as well.

-Jukka Rahkonen-