[OSM-talk] stop deleting abandoned railroads

[Colin Smale]

If only all this energy were directed at helping OSM forwards. We
haven't had a lot of progress in the last few years (I am not talking
about mapping as such, but about the OSM framework itself). 

There are still periodical discussions about how to link OSM with other
data sources - OSM IDs are too volatile, and IIRC there were objections
to putting "foreign keys" (like shop branch numbers) into OSM on the
grounds that someone would need to maintain that link. So how ARE we
going to do it then? Or are we insisting on building what we in the
trade call a "data island"? Let's build some technical bridges, so it
becomes a real alternative to maintain a parallel data set. 

And then of course there are support for 3d mapping and the "area data
type" which have been under discussion for years. 

How will we square the circle with regards to data quality? Will the
free-tagging laissez-faire camp win, or will the curated/managed tagging
camp win? How will this tug-of-war be organised? Will the forces at work
cause OSM to tend to converge towards "quality" or self-destruction?
After all, OSM says its product is the data, not a mapnik
representation. The raster tiles may look OK, but the underlying data
may tell a story of mapnik and OSS-carto having to work very hard to
mask bad data quality. 

Where is this all going to end? 

Aren't there more important things to worry about than whether or not a
couple of hundred ways deserve a place in OSM? 

--colin 

On 2015-08-17 06:50, Russ Nelson wrote: 

> Richard Fairhurst writes:
>> Frederik Ramm wrote:
>> > Inferring from that that there must have been a railway there is a 
>> > step too far. We are mappers, not trappers.
>> 
>> Tell me again you can't infer there must have been a railway there. I dare
>> you. I double dare you.
> 
> Nobody is asking Frederik to infer anything.
> 
> We're asking him to stop interfering with our inferring things -- an
> action he has said he will not stop doing. This is a problem.
 
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