[Talk-GB] English administrative divisions cleanup/fixup

[Peter Miller]

There is some admin_area data in the NaPTAN import that will be  
happening soon given that every bus stop is associated with a  
transport authority (county/unitary authority/Passenger Transport  
Executive).
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NaPTAN

We will be discussing the details of this import on talk-transit and  
you might like to get involved.


Regards,


Peter



On 15 Feb 2009, at 14:19, Feargal Hogan wrote:

> Hi
>
> First post to the list.
>
> I've been looking to get access to a set of polygons for the main  
> English
> administrative divisions. I'm not that concerned with the celtic  
> regions for
> the time being. This data <<IS>> available via ONS/OS but with  
> licencing
> restrictions. Better to use/create a free-to-use set, I thought.
>
> Working on the basis that I needed to create it myself, I took the  
> list of
> schools at http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk/call/data.html#schools  
> and
> matched it against the NPE postcode data. It only managed to geocode  
> about
> 5% of the schools, but it was enough for my next proof-of-concept  
> step.
> Using the data I was able to create voronoi cells for each Local  
> Education
> Authority (well each one that contained at least one postcode in the  
> NPE
> dataset).
>
> These were not very accurate in most cases, but some data is better  
> than
> none.
>
> My next step was to see if I could 'help' the voronoi analysis by  
> excluding
> the areas where there was already free boundary polygons available.  
> This
> took me back to OSM. So I extracted the boundary data for England  
> using
> something like
> http://osmxapi.hypercube.telascience.org/api/0.5/ 
> *[boundary=administrative][
> bbox=-4.65,50.1,2,55.4]
> and had a good browse through it to see what I was getting. The
> 'free-tagging' nature of the OSM data (and this is not a criticism,  
> just an
> observation) means that it is difficult to quantify the quality of  
> the data,
> and also it is difficult to filter the dataset into something  
> meaningful and
> useful, at least for my purposes.
>
> I figure that I am going to have to do a fair bit of clean-up on  
> this data
> before it is useful to me. What would be a real waste of time would  
> be for
> me to do all the cleanup, and then NOT reflect it back into the OSM  
> dataset.
> Whilst I have done quite a bit of interactive editing using potlatch  
> and
> josm, I haven't done any dataset uploads.
>
> So my questions are:
> 1) How should I approach such a data cleanup operation? and
> 2) Are there any agreed data tagging standards for the UK or more
> specifically for England?
>
> Appreciate any comments or suggestions you might have.
> Thks
> Feargal Hogan
>
>
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