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

[Jochen Topf]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 03:27:00PM +0000, Jukka Rahkonen wrote:
> 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.

I don't know of any case where people have actually done that, ie. imported
data and then later checked and updated it from a new version of the import
source.

Importing is difficult enough to do properly and I think updating that data is
even more difficult to do. I hope somebody actually tries this in some corner
so that we get some idea how useful this actually is and how well it can be
done. When we have some experience we can decide whether it actually makes
sense to dump huge amounts of source IDs and other data related to the sources
in OSM.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298