[OSM-talk] Import guidelines proposal update

[Lester Caine]

andrzej zaborowski wrote:
> Well, this time a
> single import account has been registered per province with a single
> person coordinating the (potential) imports in each province.  The
> assignments have been documented on the wiki.  This is better but the
> account names are still not directly linked with real people, and the
> division by provinces is artificial because the data was supposed to
> be uploaded by users only for the areas they know personally, which
> may be on village level for example.

To my eyes that provides a perfect base to work from, but if you have not been 
following the thread ...

What I have been asking is how we can manage on-going imports of a dataset that 
is being updated regularly. This is probably on 'off-line' function, and could 
well be managed by the 'local chapter' on their own computers. This is the 
'process' I'm looking to be developed, so that the raw import data is held in a 
format that later imports can be compared against, and only differences then get 
further procession. Breaking this process down into provinces, and importing the 
pre-processed RAW data via an import account gives us a clean base which mappers 
can then work against and improve the data ... and changes to the 'imported' 
data would then be mirrored back to the staging process. Seeing that an element 
is version 1 by the import user immediately tells you that it may need 
additional local information adding ( we need to be able to see who last edited 
an object! ). Where the import HAS nice unique object identifiers things are a 
lot easier, but raw vector data like the French import, and I think the Spanish 
data you are talking about CAN still be 'diffed' against earlier imports, and 
result in perhaps new data that can simply be imported, or perhaps an overlay 
that identifies conflicts that need a human eye. Isn't it better to spend time 
working out a GOOD way of using the data going forward rather than having to 
manually merge the whole lot again in a couple of years time ... and every 
couple of years.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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