Talk:Import/City of Westerville, Ohio Buildings
Franklin County
@Dkensok: Westerville is partly in Franklin County. Do the features in this dataset take precedence over the features that would otherwise come from Import/Franklin County, Ohio Buildings? How does Esri account for the possibility of other municipal datasets becoming available after the county dataset becoming available, possibly with different building attributes? – Minh Nguyễn 💬 15:15, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
@Minh Nguyen: That's a good question. In general, we would expect a City (municipal) dataset to take precedence over a County (or State) dataset based on our experience. In this specific case, I believe that is true. The Westerville data that is now available has some additional features, slightly different and better geometry for many features, and some additional attribution (e.g. more building types). The differences are marginal but, as an OSM mapper, I would give precedence to the Westerville data over the Franklin County data while doing editing inside the city. I would probably still add both to the editor (e.g. RapiD) during an editing session to decide which to use as a starting point for a given neighborhood, but likely choose the Westerville data for the reasons mentioned.
In general terms, we at Esri are thinking it will be useful to share both municipal and county datasets if we get one after the other. While there will be substantial duplication of features within the municipal area, there may be unique benefits to each dataset. In this example, I don't think it would be worth re-processing and re-publishing the Franklin County dataset to remove features that are available in the Westerville dataset, though that could be an option if the municipal dataset was universally better than the county dataset. It would be good to somehow let the OSM mapper know that overlapping datasets are available so they can make a choice.
If we get overlapping datasets at the same time, we would evaluate the differences and probably only process, publish and share the one that we believe is preferable to use. We have done that in a few cases. --Dkensok (talk) 16:43, 16 July 2021 (UTC)