[OSM-talk-be] Firefighters and OSM - meeting in August

[Julien Fastré]

Hi,

Pierre Willot and I met firefighters in Namur, a couple of days ago. 
They are located in Wallonia, but I think that what happens there might 
interest the whole Belgium.

We wrote a report of this meeting, which may be found here : 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Belgium/Contacts_with_local_autorities/Wallonia/firefighters-namur 
(in French)

A short summary : firefighters are planning to use OSM as one of their 
data sources. They have developped routing engines, which adapt 
themselves to the car profile (a 5-ton truck may not go through the same 
way as cars).

They would like that the map in their zone to be up to date. In a near 
future (if they use OSM) they will also encode new ways / deleted ways 
in the map: they are notified every time a street is modified, and will 
push the changes into OSM.

What do they ask ?

- They would like to be sure the map is up to date in their area. Until 
now, they need only the streets'axes. They have a lot of datasources 
(PICC from the Walloon Region, etc.). They would like to have a script 
to compare the existence of streets'axes which appears in the PICC into 
OSM, and if the street axe has the good 'highway' value.

The script should produce a result like "in this square, x% of the 
streets'axis are missing or does not match a correct highway value". We 
(contributors, but also firewalls) should work on those areas.

Pierre and I proposed to organise large-public mapping parties into this 
area. They are considering participating to those events.

- We were thinking about make a proposal to the hackathon egov to write 
the compare-script there. The PICC will be available there 
(http://hackathonegovwallonia.net/quest-ce-que-lopen-data/).

- The firewall will also open some database. I already received a list 
of streets which may have spelling mistakes, from instances. I will 
communicate this list soon (there are some licensed data that I must clean)

What do you think ? Do you agree on this work ? Some volunteers ?

Julien