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

Jukka Rahkonen jukka.rahkonen at latuviitta.fi
Wed Jan 25 16:27:09 GMT 2012


Frederik Ramm <frederik <at> remote.org> writes:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> On 01/24/2012 04:27 PM, 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.
> 
> Maybe we should simply stop them from doing that?
> 
> > Much of that
> > data is hard or impossible to update by OSM contributors but new updates
> > will be offered from the original sources.
> 
> That sounds like a perfect reason to not import.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> All that should not be in OSM.

Myself I agree with you. But lots of people consider that the Mapnik slippy map
in www.openstreetmap.org is the main product of OSM and they like that the map
is better with more colours. We cannot really say that data that are needed for
colouring the map should not be imported into the OSM database without giving an
alternative. Right now I remember only two common examples about combining OSM
data and some other data outside the main OSM database for rendering. First is
about height contours and another one is about using OSM coastline shapefiles.

Let's take Corine an an example because even it is a fine dataset, it is made
for different purpose and in OSM it can only serve for giving some colour to the
maps. If it should not be imported into the OSM database then what would be a
better way for utilising Corine data? I would really like to see the Corine data
somewhere else than in the main OSM database because I am interested in the true
OSM data created by OSM users. I do not have any use for Corine land cover data
but I cannot avoid downloading it over and over again every time I am fetching a
new OSM country extract.


-Jukka Rahkonen-








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