[OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] In what direction should OSM go?

Anthony osm at inbox.org
Wed Sep 29 16:59:50 BST 2010


On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 13:44, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>> Of course, if keeping stuff in sync is practically impossible, a good
>> import is probably going to have to be manual (if you can't keep stuff
>> in sync, and the data is in a form which is already commonly used for
>> non-imported data, then you can't avoid redundancies in the import).
>
> This is largely a problem with our tools, not something that can't be
> fixed.
>
> Distributed version control systems already solve the problem of
> merging foreign data where your copy of it has moved since the
> original import, there's no reason for why we couldn't make keeping
> imports up-to-date significantly easier using similar techniques.
>
I don't know of any "distributed version control systems" which do
anything remotely close to this.  It seems to me to be an AI-hard
problem in the general case (*).  There are, of course, tools which
can do this in specialized cases, but that's where the "if" in the "if
keeping stuff in sync is practically impossible" comes into place.

(*) In fact, I'd say that anyone who can devise a general tool which
can merge all the different foreign databases together has thereby
rendered OSM obsolete.



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