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David William Bitner wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:d2f53e190907280750h2c3fd651p97305b2bd61017e7@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 9:25 AM, Arnulf
Christl <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:arnulf.christl@wheregroup.com">arnulf.christl@wheregroup.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">> I'll also add that just because a geodata set
has a stamp or<br>
> "authority", and some apparent quality assurance process, does not<br>
> mean that the resulting data is any better, or the process any more<br>
> full proof, than the many eyes approach of OSM.<br>
<br>
</div>
True. At the same time for some it does make a difference whether an<br>
authority of some kind stamps information or not. OSGeo may well (be)<br>
develop(ed) into a kind of authority because it is not ...</blockquote>
<div><br>
Often times when liability is concerned sometimes -- often more wrongly
than right -- it is necessary to use an "official" version of something
merely for the reason that you can then pass-the-buck if there are
problems. Along the same lines, when you are doing work that could end
up in a courtroom or more simply end up getting questioned or audited
or .... it is necessary to build off something that is at least a
snapshot such that those who are questioning/auditing/whatevering you
can go back and recreate your work from the same version of the data
that you had used. <br>
<br>
As with source code, versioning, having snapshots, sometimes having a
branch away from trunk that gets released (think a snapshot of OSM at a
certain time that has been deemed by a local authority as acceptable
for planning work and tagged as such) can be very valuable things that
can help to bridge the gap between the "wilds" of crowd sourcing and
the need for control of "official" datasets. Along with this, as an
entity considers tagging a blessed version for whatever purpose, as the
trunk continues to change, having good "diff" tools becomes important
for the authorities such that they can monitor what is changing and can
respond accordingly (accepting the edits, going back in and saying "no,
we surveyed this with super new fangled gadget and know that it is
right" etc).<br>
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<pre wrap="">
</pre>
</blockquote>
There has been some good brainstorming on this idea at a few recent
conferences and sessions. An entity could "sign" a snapshot/region/way.
Calculate the MD5 hash, apply your GPG public key, and you now have an
'official', or accepted, version of data. This is similar to how Git
(and other DVCS tools) work. <br>
<div class="moz-signature"><br>
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