[Imports] Road data imports from CC0 government database for Sweden

[Anders Torger]

FYI, I just went through the archives of talk-se a bit further back and 
indeed there I see many names I recognize also from the OSM Sweden 
Facebook group, so it's known also by those users. My email there still 
seems stuck in a moderator queue though so it's not appeared yet and 
there have been no posts in that list since February 12.

I've also just posted to the OSM forum, 
https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=72307 but again much 
lower activity there than in the facebook group and fewer of the 
experienced mappers so I don't have high hopes for a lively discussion 
there, but we'll see. Just making sure that so many as possible is 
reached before we go ahead.

Most discussion so far have taken place in the facebook group as well as 
the issue tracker when the translation script has been debugged and 
refined https://github.com/atorger/nvdb2osm/issues/, and there most 
feedback has been from a Norwegian import expert, the brain behind the 
Norwegian NVDB import so it's been very useful.

In the broader facebook group there's overall only been a handful of 
individuals involved actively in the discussions which has mostly been 
by answering open questions I've put out to the community regarding best 
practices, plus we've had endorsement by end users and casual mappers 
that just want to see better quality in the Swedish OSM road data. The 
Swedish OSM community is pretty small, and the group of users with 
long-term experience that is also active today is even smaller so we do 
not expect a big discussion to take place within the Swedish community.

One concern that has been raised not by OSM people but from the general 
GIS community which also is active in these forums is how we're supposed 
to keep in synch with NVDB, pushing the idea that an import would be 
meaningless if it can't keep up the changes. NVDB is indeed continously 
updated when new roads are built or traffic rules change, there's even 
an open live API to get live changes. Our response to that is that most 
of the road network is static, and once the overall quality of the OSM 
data is raised such that roads are actually positioned correctly and 
have good coverage it's much easier to make quality assurance tools that 
can automatically compare and make small diffs between NVDB and OSM say 
on a yearly basis for manual review and inclusion. It's an open question 
though, for the initial import work we don't have a plan to 
automatically keep track of changes.

/Anders

On 2021-03-24 08:36, Anders Torger wrote:
> I've made an announcement to talk-se as the process requries, no reply
> yet. But it was recent and there is very low activity in that group.
> Still waiting. I actually do not know about the visibility, there's
> relatively low activity in also in the Facebook group, lots of passive
> listeners which I do not know the names of. That I ended up there is
> by going through all the various forums etc to find where "all the
> action were", and while relatively low activity it was more than in
> the other places. (Facebook groups for all sorts of things is very
> popular in Sweden).