[Imports] Heads up: Building Canada 2020

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 10/18/2017 10:00 PM, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
> Hi - just as an initial heads-up, Statistics Canada - effectively, the
> Canadian Federal Government - wishes to have all of Canada's buildings
> on OSM by 2020.

I'm sure there are many people who wish that some data were in OSM by
some deadline. This doesn't mean that their wishes automatically come
true ;)

What support (in terms of manpower, money, or other resources) are
Statistics Canada offering in return for their wishes being granted?

> This will entail major imports of municipal data and
> superhuman efforts on the part of the LWG to keep track of and approve
> all of Canada's many data licences. 

It is good that the web page has some numbers ("It is expected that the
number of buildings that needs to be added is about 10 million"). It
would be greater still if you could work with these numbers a bit and
come up with some estimates:

* 10 million buildings - what will that do to the current OSM database,
will it grow by 0.01%, 0.1%, or 1% as a result? (At the danger of
sounding greedy - and I think as the OSMF treasurer I have a license to
be - such a figure would allow us to say "hey, adding these 10 million
buildings costs approximately X on the hardware side, would you care to
make a donation?")

* Do you already have an idea what percentage will come from imports?

* How can you ensure that you have local (!) people performing the
imports? Can Statistics Canada help train people and hold events in
areas where the OSM community is thin on the ground? "Building Canada
2020" should be a good enough battle cry to rally interested parties
even if they're not already in OSM.

* How much work will be required to do the necessary quality checks on
the imports (compare to existing data, aerial imagery etc.)? From my own
experience I'd guess I can perhaps handle 200 buildings an hour which
would extrapolate to 50,000 person-hours but it would be great if you
could come up with an idea yourself. Are you looking for 5 people
putting in 10,000 hours each, or 5000 people putting in 10 hours each?

I liked that you wrote,

"Although it may be reasonably expected that the bulk of baseline data
will be provided by existing administrative open data, it is recognized
that all of these methods are equally important to achieve the objective
of Building Canada 2020."

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"