[OSM-talk-be] data for Brussels, Belgium from authorities for OSM

[Dennis Bollyn]

Nicolas,

I know from experience it's very hard to get officials interested in 
OSM, so I can only applaud your efforts.

> First, the very good and positive information: I contacted the cabinet
> of the minister Smet (SP-A), told my correspondents (there were 2)
> about OSM, the philosophy and aims, and asked for a first simple
> support. Minister Smet is in charge of "mobility" in RBC and as
> recently announced the future (time frame is about 1 year) creation of
> a mobility portal on internet to inform and get feedback from the
> citizens. I therefore asked if we (= the OSM project) could just, as
> some newspapers receive the weekly information that the administration
> gathers about all the road works that are being done. My correspondant
> found the project very very interesting, and agreed to ask the
> administration to send us the information.  He was so enthusiastic
> that he will speak in person about the project to the minister (who is
> known to cycle in the city when the weather permits). We have
> considered to meet and possibly discuss other support they could
> provide.

So the goal would be to show all planned and current road works on the 
map? I don't think this should go in the main OSM database since this is 
dynamic information. You could, however, setup a custom layer on top of 
the OSM data showing this information. From what I gather, this is 
fairly easy with OpenLayers. We might be able to use the NL tileserver 
for this.

> I said I would manage for the OSM project to officially thank him for
> such a support (even if small). Politicians like such official thanks.

I'm not sure how this official thank would work. A message on the 
mailing list, or a news post on the website or something?

> Some first questions about this would be :
> 
> to whom should I discuss that and is there a recommended format to
> easily incorporate such information nearly authomatically into OSM
> (that is with little manipulations) ?
> 
> Is such an activity already performed somewhere ?

As Johan said, there are several formats that can be directly imported. 
If no formats match, (depending on the format) a converter could be 
written. I have some (non-OSM) experience in this, so I can volunteer to 
do this.

> Should all such information be personnally checked on the ground
> before including into OSM or would it be possible to "trust" such an
> official administration for its data (and possible mistakes ?)

The usual procedure is to import the data as-is and verify its 
correctness afterwards. The import can be skipped for areas that are 
already completely mapped.

> Secondly: the RBC is already well mapped in the urbis [2] system that
> belongs to the RBC and is managed by the brussels centrum for public
> computing (rough translation), called CIRB [1]. As I happened to be
> one of their former employee, I know some people there, and I got in
> touch with the former responsible of urbis [2]. For a long time, the
> Cirb was rather jealous about the Urbis data, but as the time goes by,
> I decided to get back in touch and suggest that they could release the
> data to OSM as the OSM licence was CC-SA, and that this would not
> create a competing proprietary market for the data (that they could
> not use) due to the SA clause, and that it would be fully possible to
> consider a double licensing CC-SA to and through OSM and a proprietary
> one to other users (the CIRB already offers Urbis data freely to
> schools in RBC and consider to offer the Urbis data for free - gratis
> - to everybody for personnal use). My contact was again very very
> positive (to my surprise !). And he is already asking questions about
> technical consideration: wich data would be most interesting, who
> would take the charge to convert these data and inject them into OSM
> ... ?

Basically the same response as above. The Urbis data seems to be very 
detailed (as far as individual buildings), and is thus very valuable.

 From looking at the website, it seems that this data is available in 
ESRI format, which can be imported with this script: 
<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/WikiProject_Falkland_Islands/Converting_Government-supplied_data>
I haven't checked the other formats in detail (I will do so soon), but 
these might contain more information that we can use.

Best regards,

Dennis Bollyn