It's great to see people, esp governments, using OSM. It's strange you had that problem with the one-way street. OSM definitly doesn't require that everything h

It's great to see people, esp governments, using OSM. It's strange you had that problem with the one-way street. OSM definitly doesn't require that everything has photographic evidence. I suspect a concern was copyright infringment. Is your GIS data public domain? If not, then it's copyrighted[1], so 'copying' data from that into OSM would essentially be a type of copyright infringement! What's to stop you adding all the info from your GIS data into OSM? All the road names, all the shop names, all the addresses? You see the problem? If you go there, physically, and look at the sign, or take a photo then the source of the data in OSM is your eyes, not the GIS data. Requiring someone to go there is essentially a form of "clean room reimplementation" of the data, and hence has no copyright issue. OSM prefers "local knowledge" so if you, personally, know that that street is one-way, because for example you're familiar with the area, then that's an acceptable, copyright free source. [1] Before people jump in, yes the USA has a 'all map data from the federal government is free' that's not the case everywhere, and yes, under US copyright law non-creative pure facts aren't copyrightable, and hence there's no worry, but in some countries (e.g. the UK) you can copyright non-creative things which you spent effort collecting ('sweat of the brow'). OSM is erring on the side of caution and being strict. And OSM is not a place to experiment with the grey areas of international copyright law)