[OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

[Colin Smale]

Sometimes land ownership is a matter of public record, it seems. Zoom in
and click on a plot: 

http://gis.stlouiscountymn.gov/planningflexviewers/County_Explorer/ 

Sure there are privacy considerations, but they are not the same in all
jurisdictions. And the face that some jurisdictions would have a problem
with OSM having data that other jurisdictions would frown upon, is no
reason in itself to disqualify that whole category of data from OSM. We
have similar challenges with military stuff and disputed borders as
well. We don't want to become a least common denominator with only data
that is agreed by the entire world. 

On 2015-09-02 14:23, phil at trigpoint.me.uk wrote: 

> On Wed Sep 2 13:15:42 2015 GMT+0100, moltonel 3x Combo wrote: On 02/09/2015, Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl> wrote: I see two separate issues getting mixed up: firstly, what types of data
> "belong" in OSM as a matter of principle, and secondly what quality
> criteria would apply. Clearly for the second point the data needs to be
> suitably licensed (if it is externally sourced) and it needs to be
> verifiable so "Joe Public" without any form of privileged access can
> verify its correctness. These are clearly principles which have existed
> in OSM for a long time. But a statement that certain whole categories of
> data do not belong in OSM *because* it sometimes might not be easily
> verifiable, is going a bit far. 
> Saying that land property has no place in OSM is just a conclusion
> that comes from the observation that this kind of data generally poses
> big chalenges to verifyability and corrrectness, and that its
> usefullness in osm is limited because ownership is one thing where you
> have no choice to use the official authoritative source.
> 
> If there's somewhere in the world where those concerns are not valid,
> then go on and map properrty data there. Again, do you know of any
> property data in osm ? What's the tagging schema ?
> 
> The principle of "what data belongs in OSM" is about the propeties of
> that data, not what kind of data it is. But as it happens, a given
> kind of data usually has the same properties, so "this kind of data
> doesn't belong in OSM" is a usefull simplification.
 We can map barriers and visible dividing marks, but land ownership has
massive privacy and data protection issues.

Phil (trigpoint) 
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