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

Anthony osm at inbox.org
Thu Sep 30 16:21:39 BST 2010


On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 11:03 AM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:
>> There's an iron rod in the ground in the
>> northeast corner of my property boundary.  To the extent the position
>> of that iron rod currently differs with the lat/lon in the county
>> records (even with the lat/lon in the deed to my property or in the
>> plat to my neighborhood), the legal position of the boundary is the
>> position of the iron rod, not the lat/lon.
>
> Unless your county's deeds and plats are rather different from Orange
> County's, everything (outside pre-PLSS land grants and maybe a few
> other areas) falls back not on lat/lon, but on the Public Land Survey
> System and its "certified corner records":
> http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0100-0199/0177/Sections/0177.507.html

If the definition is not expressed in terms of lat/lon, then it
necessarily *can* be edited, because OSM is expressed in lat/lon.

> I guess your point is that everything can be surveyed, even something
> that's not "on the ground" if you have a description in relation to
> on-the-ground features.

I don't really like using the term "on the ground" because it is so
poorly defined, but to the extent I do use it I don't think it's
supposed to be taken literally.  I say a corner of a border which is
"500 feet due north of survey marker J32" is "on the ground", that it
can be surveyed, that it can be edited, and that no lat/lon given in a
government database will ever be perfect (though it may be perfect to
the 9 decimal places or whatever used by OSM, at least until the
continental plate shifts enough).

I think it's pretty obvious that my property boundary can be surveyed.
 I have a survey of it!



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