[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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