[OSM-talk] How I got here - was Geocaching.com moved to OSM (partly)

John Sturdy jcg.sturdy at gmail.com
Thu Jan 19 11:49:42 GMT 2012


On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 11:20 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> One problem I'd see around here is that this kind
> of data is not very stable (usually the dead remain only for 20 years
> in their graves, not for eternity, but this depends on the religion
> and local culture).

In ordinary UK churchyards and other cemeteries, the graves remain for
centuries, and there are some gravestones and tombs still in place
from several centuries ago.

> Keeping this data in a separate layer is suboptimal: e.g. you will
> have tombs in OSM and the graves in them in another layer, now if
> someone moves the tombs (to improve the position) they would move the
> dead out of their tombs. Very bad for your karma...

I remember, from working on a project to encourage local authorities
to use free / open source software, that there are specialized
software packages for cemetery management.  (These were a sticking
point / excuse for inertia in FLOSS adoption, as they ran only on
Windows.)  It might be worth looking for existing standards as to what
data is kept.  There might also be existing databases that would be
available for import (although I gather some of the OSM community
isn't keen on bulk imports, but these will at least be fairly local).
And perhaps local authorities who are starting to use OSM might be
interested in using it to store their cemetery data.

__John



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