[TCMUG] Use OpenStreetMap for Landmarks?

[David William Bitner]

The OSM community (or at least some key members) have really taken more of
an interest of late in trying to work with government agencies to make OSM a
standard part of business.  There are definitely some folks from OSM that we
can pull into this discussion who would be excited to try to work something
out that could address the concerns a government agency might have
(versioning, metadata specifying "official source",...).


This also has the potential of making a reality some difficult landmark
> issues we’ve been dealing with for a while. Basically, how do we create and
> update a landmarks dataset that is current, broad and multi-functional at a
> regional level? Perhaps this idea has value from the Geocoding, and
> Emergency Response perspectives as well?
>
>
>
> Certainly there are questions. Here are some:
>
>
>
>    1. How do we mitigate unexpected content that could show up on our map?
>
> Vigilance and making sure that we encourage the folks who are using the
landmarks to pay attention.  The value of crowd-sourcing gets higher the
more eyes are on the content.

>
>    1. How is this managed from a technical perspective?
>
>  At the simplest level, staff from the Met Council just acts as any other
OSM contributor.

>
>    1. How do we (or can we) maintain the attributes that we’ve already
>    invested in?
>    2. Can a gov’t institution make OSM a part of its operations without
>    violating the spirit?
>
> Absolutely! In fact that very much is the spirit.

>  Some notes:
>
>    1. I’ve tried to contact OSM in accordance with their guidelines on a
>    bulk import. While it is a possibility, they are very sensitive to this type
>    of behavior. I haven’t heard back from them. See the import guidelines.
>
>
Do you have any direct OSM contacts?  If not I can track some folks down
that can help us work through this.

>
>    1.
>    2. Some data from datafinder has already been imported into OSM.
>    3. OSM describes a rich set of map feature attributes (tags). I
>    encourage you to check it out.
>    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features
>    4. Tags from specific data sources can include additional tags specific
>    to the original data source like *datasource:key**=value*, for example
>    “tiger:cfcc=A10”
>
>
>
> I’d love to hear your comments, if you have any. In the meantime, I am
> working out some internal technical issues to make this happen on a test
> basis for the Met Council. I’m also introducing myself to the OSM community.
>
>
> David
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/tcmug/attachments/20091106/5f413ab2/attachment.html