[OSGeodata] Geodata through CVS or SVN...

Christopher Schmidt crschmidt at crschmidt.net
Fri Jul 7 17:29:53 EDT 2006


On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 03:16:07PM -0400, Sampson, David wrote:
> I'm interested in what else has been tried or thought of instead of
> passing around a bunch of files.  I thought maybe an application
> througha website to a postgis DB, but that's too much for our group to
> dedicate time to.

OpenStreetMap has basically been working against a model similar to this
for a while now -- they work with a wiki-storage model where all data is
versioned, and anyone can edit any existing data. They use a topological
format for storing data -- lat/lon are stored in nodes, and then
segments are links between nodes, etc. This doesn't work really well
when you have geographic formats already, and is designed more for the
use case of collecting your own data with a GPS and drawing a map with
that.

> So how can we think of geodata as source code?  What am I missing in my
> thinking?

The OSM approach to this is not to consider geodata as source code, but
geodata as a wiki. This approach does seem to have similar results to
what you're looking at though.

(This is not an endorsement for the OpenStreetMap way of doing things.)

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer




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