It's a straw man to say that I have said someone had to have been to a place to map it. I have never said such a thing and it is disingenuous to say that I have. What I have said is that it is the practice of OSM to give precedent to those who are more local than those who are far away.

As for your water color analogy it fails because it is you arbitrarily painting rather than using time tested remote sensing practices to derive land cover. Such a statement isn't made out of a objective opinion but is emotional rebuttal unconnected with reality.

As for it being an import I stand by my statement that since the data has been derived by me through geoprocessing and editing it is not an import any more than mass edits made from a large gps file or hand drawn map. If it is the case that someone from DWG disagrees with that and chooses to revert it then I disagree with their decision but I'm not going to redo this or decide to start some sort of flame/edit/revert war, I'm an adult and am fully capable of disagreeing without engaging in logical fallacies, ad hominem, or general childish behavior.

I think most of the problem comes from everyone assuming this should look like trees on a satellite, it's scrub and not always easy to see in aerials and it's heavier in some years than others. It's not like the forests in Missouri and other places that also have discontinuity but are much easier to pick out because they have tall trees. Vegetation can sometimes blend into the ground depending on climate and region.

In any case what the powers that be decide to do is their purview, I do object to reversion (especially for someone's personal aesthetic preference) and if it must be done I would prefer it be done for the correct reasons and by someone in authority. If the DWG feels it needs to go then they need to pull the trigger and get it done. All I was trying to do was add vegetation to areas that look devoid of it in areas I am attached to by family, history, and property.

I don't think anyone who has commented thus far has ever even been to this county so their ability to claim what is there or not is questionable at best. The dataset I derived this data from uses commonly accepted remote sensing practices to ascertain land cover. To take issue with it is to take issue with the science that backs that. Prior to all the fuss I had planned on doing many of the neighboring counties so it doesn't look like an anomaly in the state but I don't want to put in the time and effort to make datasets when several people from hundreds if not thousands of miles away feel they can tell what is on the ground better than someone who travels often to this area to visit family. I think people are a little to skippy with the urge to use revert when the general practice of the map is not to make such broad changes to areas that are remote from your own location. To each their own I'm done fighting over what a select few think the map ought to be and their tilting at the windmills of acceptable practices in science.

Probably because the discussion hasn't lead to a confident conclusion. If a member of the DWG dropped it then it should probably be left alone by others who are not in geographic proximity to the area as well but feel free to bump it up the chain and we will see what happens.

Yeah I don't mind taking care of it later, but honestly the changeset says it's part of the Microsoft buildings import, if you see a mistake it's probably just something missed so feel free to fix it.

Let's do a hypothetical to see why you believe this is an import. Let's say I go to a museum and while there I notice a map on display showing historical trails between the California Missions that was made during the time of St. Junipero Serra. Now I take a high resolution photo of this map. I bring that home and georeference it in QGIS, rasterize it, extract the trail cells, convert them to linestrings, smooth and simplify them, bring that file into JOSM, check them against the photo of the map that they are generally in the right place and have never been mapped before, tag them and then upload the changeset. Would you consider that an import? If so one could argue that almost any new data added to the map is an import. How would that be different in the case of this changeset?

I created the data using GIS processing tools, I hand edited in JOSM, there is no license to public domain maps. It is no different than having a friend collect GPS points, processing them in other software, and then loading them into JOSM and fine tuning the data through hand edits. You have made up your mind that you are going to let it be reverted on the subjective grounds laid forth by others so just do it and be done with it. Just know these heavy handed approaches by people with no relation with the area will make it harder to recruit local mappers.

Again by the definitions and rules of imports as I have read them and as have been spoken about in other groups I still don't feel this is an import based on those definitions. You may disagree and since you sit on the DWG what you do is your decision. I honestly am at the point where you and the other natural area editors who have complained about this method (again a method I have used and seen used in professional GIS work) have made me stop caring about mapping an area that is important to my family and my family's heritage. All from people who live many hundreds of miles away.

I love this idea that proven processes of land classification made by professionals in the field are somehow suspect and erroneous to the self appointed gate keepers of the map or their niche interests.

Hi Andy,

I don't feel that this qualifies as an import due to how removed it is from the source material, generally speaking imports don't go through transitions except those necessary for it to be recognized by the map (tags, relations, sometimes simplification). As for a license there isn't one because the work is a derivative of public domain data. So there is no need for license issues. As for your Mapbox satellite idea we do know that these types of area are generalizations of underlying vegetation right? I mean not every single spot in a forest has a tree right? It's a basic geographical principle though that areas adjacent to others have similar properties correct? What this has come down to is some popular people, probably some friends of yours, have taken a subjective taste issue with this and none of them live near the area in question or have any connection to it. Essentially you are enforcing someone's personal opinion on the changeset rather than any objective criteria. If that's the case, as the above comments have readily admitted, then feel free to revert it but just admit the reason your are doing it is subjective rather than try to cloak it in some form of official rule that we know doesn't really exist. It's this kind of attitude from fellow mappers that discourages people from making edits and contributing in the long run to the map.

Near as I can tell Jersey is a long ways away from Coke County Texas

It's not copied but through GIS processes it is derived from a public domain map which is 100% compatible because it has no license whatsoever. Secondly this is a way of deriving land cover that is used in many maps by professionals. Thirdly you should not be reverting something without having a thorough conversation with the person who made the edit and you should take into account whether or not you are local enough to make that call. Cool your jets and mind your own area of the map

It not only has inroads in Germany it also has branches in the UK, Ukraine, Canada, and the Baltic States. They have been responsible for at least 7 murders one of which was a openly gay Jew who was targeted, kidnapped, and stabbed over 20 times. Atomwaffen has also made threats against the Royal Family in the UK, politicians in Germany, and most recently members planned mass shooting in Virginia. While it might have once had a different meaning one should rethink such a name in an open and collaborative environment such as OSM as it could easily scare away or intimidate mappers that belong to groups that are vulnerable to the violence and hate that atomwaffen espouses.

Cheers.

It's not so I didn't. Might want to change your username, that group is pretty violent and intolerant, you wouldn't want to be confused with a white supremacist group.

True but as TNRIS is where I got it and they posted the license I give them the credit.

The data that has been uploaded is my data as it is in a completely different format than it was originally, even then I acknowledged the original dataset from which it was derived.

As for spot checking it is a highly inaccurate way to see vegetation as your eye is not as sensitive as the sensor, the aerials may be from too high to notice nuance, their quality might be too low, and as they are snapshots in time the vegetation may have changed.

As I have been told by others and have read by others that this method of mapping is not an import then I am afraid we will have to disagree on that issue. Your doubts are neither here nor there.

As to the quality I am sure I can go through your edits and take issue with quality, it is a matter of opinion and taste and something one has to learn to deal with in a volunteer based cooperative environment. As this area doesn't tread on your toes in your area of work and I am far more local to it than you (my family lives and owns land in this area) I believe that I should have more say in the matter as we tend to give more credence to the mapper closer to that which is being mapped.

If you do feel extremely strong in your opinion feel free to report the edit to the proper authorities and they can do as they please.

It isn't an import, I made it. As for the quality it is derived from semi automated classification of aerial imagery with an infrared sensor by the organization in question which is distributed as a faster file under an open license. From that file I polygonized the different expertly classified vegetation so that it would be compatible with the map. I then ran smoothing over that and removed areas that were smaller than 100 sq ft as they were usually in areas of urban development. After that to remove extraneous nodes I simplified the edges. After all of this geoprocessing was done I brought the file into JOSM and checked that the vegetation didn't overlap roads, buildings, parking lots, or water features (which if we want to talk about quality why not the edges of lakes). Then I copied the features into the map in JOSM and uploaded it. It is very similar to natural features found in European countries (Germany for example) where it is nice to differentiate between urban and more natural settings. My plan is to continue with other counties in the surrounding area. As the features were created solely by me through geoprocessing and as I copied them into the map myself I do not think it qualifies as an import and the claim that the quality is low doesn't really hold as the classification on the original raster frown which these faces are derived was done by professionals. To add to that the geoprocessing was also done by a professional as I am an independent GIS consultant with over 10 years of experience.

Just noticed you deleted the scrub I added to the map. What was your reasoning behind this decision? The tag isn't deprecated and as the land in question belongs to my family I can verify the vegetation type.

Yeah I mentioned I had forgot to set one up in the task comment. Working on that now.

I would also like to point out that another user told me that what I did was not an import so I suppose I would like some clarification of what your definition of an import is if it differs from the official one and whether or not you think opening a shapefile in JOSM and copying the contents and cleaning any errors would be considered an import.

Forgive me, I did not know what I was doing was in fact what was defined as importing as I am an individual and not an entity. With reading the import protocols and seeing that its application is not restricted to large entities or large data sets I see that I was in error.