[Geowanking] Maintaining Open Spatial Data Sets (was TeleAtlas Car)

[Bill Thoen]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 08:39:09AM -0400, B.K. DeLong wrote:
>
> And, in theory, with an open source, community-contributed dataset 
> there'd be more people to fix mistakes and keep it more updated due 
> to various construction and repair activities.
> 

I imagine that a community effort to maintain a data set that represents a
road network would operate in a way similar to a wiki, but how do you
ensure that additions and "fixes" are done with the appropriate precision
and accuracy (and who decides?) Who interprets road classifications and
other attributes that mean different things to different people? Finnally,
what sorts of legal issues are involved in producing a data source that
might be used in public safety applications? Can a community effort
"certify" a certain level of accuracy for use in such applications?

Nevertheless, the idea of "open source" spatial data sets sounds pretty
interesting to me.

- Bill Thoen