[OSM-talk] Zero tolerance on imports

[Russ Nelson]

Peter Budny writes:
 > I find this discussion very distasteful.

That's because nobody is talking about the REAL
solution. OpenStreetMap is the place for user-edited volunteered
geographic information. It's NOT the place for importing information
which would be nonsensical if a user edited it.

The REAL solution is to have a ClosedStreetMap.org, which publishes
data in the same format under the same license using the same tag set
using the same API as OpenStreetMap, only it publishes read-only data.
Some of the imports that I've done (NYC bike racks, NYS DEC lands, and
NYS State Parks, which I'm currently working on), the data is
maintained elsewhere. It useful to have for OpenStreetMap users, but
not for OpenStreetMap editors. Why? Because for at least the last two,
the boundaries are off in the middle of sometimes very dense woods,
are not necessarily marked by signs, if signs are present they are not
authoritative, and the original source of the data is a legal
description, and no hand editing can change that.

So take all these data sets, and their transformative programs, create
.osm files out of them, and throw them into a database. When you get
updates, rebuild the database.

There's a few problems with the idea, e.g. what if somebody adds
something to OSM that's already in CSM? Or, what if the data, although
published from an authoritative source, is dirty? How does OSM
override data in CSM?

But I think there are fewer problems than the current system of one
person dumping in megabytes for which there is no practical means of
updating with another import.

-- 
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