[OSM-talk] "proprietary" keys and values, machine readable vs. humans

Jukka Rahkonen jukka.rahkonen at latuviitta.fi
Tue Jan 24 15:27:00 GMT 2012


Pieren <pieren3 <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 12:42 PM, Jonathan Bennett
> <openstreetmap <at> jonno.cix.co.uk> wrote:
> > We have (or at least, should have) a simple principle in OSM: Ignore what
you don't understand.
> 
> I could add another one : "delete what is beyond understanding".
> Because your principle is against another one : "verifiability".
> Because your principle - if it is tolerated - might end up with
> elements tagged with dozen references to external applications and the
> readable tags will disappear in the number.

We will see much more proprietary keys in the future because people are 
importing huge amounts of spatial data from external sources. Much of that
data is hard or impossible to update by OSM contributors but new updates 
will be offered from the original sources. Topological data and landuse 
data are some examples. Corine land cover will be updated this year, 9 
gigabytes of topological vector data from the National Land Survey of 
Finland will be free under attribution-only license in May and so on. In such
situation people start thinking about adding source-IDs as OSM tags in a hope
that some part of the data could be more or less automatically updated on
the OSM side later.

-Jukka Rahkonen-








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