[OSM-talk] How to deal with versioning
Martijn van Exel
martijn at geodan.nl
Wed Jun 1 18:59:48 BST 2011
On 6/1/11 4:18 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 06/01/11 15:55, Martijn van Exel wrote:
>> 1 A building object is being imported from an open public sector dataset
>> 3 The building receives some modifications by human contributors
>> (attributes, geometry, or both)
>> 3 A new version of the public sector data becomes available and is
>> imported.
>>
>> Currently, in step 3. the human contributions would be lost, unless
>> each building that received community modifications is manually merged
>> with the new import.
>>
>> How can we deal with this situation?
>
> Don't import anything that has a life (i.e. is continuously maintained)
> elsewhere.
>
> Only import stuff of which OSM then takes ownership.
I don't think that will be a tenable attitude in the longer run.
OpenStreetMap and public sector data (that's what we're mostly dealing
with when we consider imports) will not continue to be two totally
disparate entities, who have 'ownership' over the data that is in their
respective databases. I foresee[1] a future reality in which the flow of
information between OpenStreetMap and the public sector can be more
bi-directional and also more continuous - where public bodies and OSM
mutually benefit from each other's unique capabilities to maintain
geodata. Enabling this would require much more elaborate version
control, with smart conflict resolution.
But also for much simpler situations this may be a useful thing. I don't
know about you, but there have been occasions where I forgot to save my
edits in JOSM only to get a conflict warning when I wanted to save the
edits later. Don't get me wrong - it's great that JOSM provides the
conflict resolution tools that it does, but I feel that a) this does not
scale well and b) it could be simpler (read: automatic) in many cases.
[1] Disclaimer: I don't have any Sylar-esque superheroic precognition
capabilities.
--
Martijn van Exel
Senior Researcher
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