[Geodata] wiki-nature geodata aggregators

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

I've recently been amazed at how both geonames and OpenStreetmap are
now acting as data aggregators for a lot of other sources:

http://www.geonames.org/data-sources.html
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potential_Datasources

Great that this is happening, but also provoking an "issue" insofaras:
- such sites have "wiki-nature" interfaces to accept modifications and
improvements
- there's no mechanism to feed changes back to help fix and improve
the original sources

The admin burden in feeding changes back would be pretty high for a
community run, open site.

Open geodata is still open to accusations of data quality problems -
variability in coverage, variable generailty in precision.
"It would be nice" to see a data quality push - not in terms of
comparison to proprietary sources, but in terms of peer review and of
spreading, well, quality assurance, through the network back up to
original data providers. How to do this without bureaucratic overhead
(or while funding bureaucratic overhead)? Answers on a postcard...


love, jo