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

Toby Murray toby.murray at gmail.com
Tue Jan 24 15:56:27 GMT 2012


On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Jochen Topf <jochen at remote.org> wrote:
> 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.

I think people keep assuming that "someone will figure this out at
some point" and completely skip over considering the issue of updates
when they import. And it's not just a matter of having source IDs.
What about data that has been updated by a human? It is entirely
possible that the edit was accidental or mistaken. But then again
maybe not. So now you have data you don't want to touch for fear of
overwriting someone's edit. But then that might break things in the
rest of the external data you are trying to update. So it's a mess.
But people are sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring it.

Toby



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