[Imports] [Talk-ca] [Import] Ottawa Buildings & Addresses [Statistics Canada project]

[Stewart C. Russell]

Hi Christoph,

> Could you please clarify what the alleged source of the building data to 
> be imported is?

Yes, as far as I understand it, at least: these data to be imported were
given to a group of OSM contributors by the City of Ottawa. They have
explicit permission to include it in OSM from the City. The only place
you can inspect the data is on the contributors' own hosting sites, as
the city doesn't host it anywhere. Details of the licence and
permissions are on the Ottawa import information page.

> What is shown in
> 
> https://gist.github.com/scruss/5a3f469c47df5d27fdba28258c273b45
> 
> does not match geometry-wise.

I know. That link was derived from the city's own topo database from
2011, which *is* published on the city's open data website. I have a
feeling that the city doesn't want to give away their 2016 topo database
— not realising that by allowing the 2016 building outlines to be
imported into OSM, they kind of *are* giving away the current database ...

The public 2011 data set is cut into 2×1 km tiles, slicing through
buildings on the border. There are no common attributes which would
allow repair, as the data is packaged in AutoCAD DWG files.

So the options are:

1. Import from a current source that we have OSM contributors' word that
was provided by the city under a permissive licence, or

2. Import from a data set that is published on the City website but is
possibly outdated, is in a horrible file format, has no documentation or
metadata (apart from the licence) and would need a large amount of
cleanup to be remotely usable.

If [2] is the only option, I have a feeling that the Canadian federal
government, the City of Ottawa and Open North (the open data advocacy
group providing coding and community liaison support) would be strongly
disinclined to work with or support OSM again. Worst of all, the tiny
Canadian OSM community might lose some very dedicated mappers if this
process puts them off contributing again.

cheers,
 Stewart