[OSM-talk-be] Meeting with SPW (some elements of the discussion may also interest Flemish people)

[Julien Fastré]

Hi,

This is some news following the contact that eMerzh, Benoit Coumont and
I had with the SPW (Service Public de Wallonie) on Friday.

The meeting was rather positive. They think about applying an
ODbL-compatible licence on some data.

- at first, they will think about letting us use the new orthophoto
(precision 25cm). The year-2012 pictures will be published on the
website before summer ;
- we agreed on the fact that beginning "slowly" is better. They will
discuss about releasing three kind of data under open-licence:
    - hydrological data (there isn't a lot of rivers and streams in the db)
    - path and footways, because we were thinking that osm is quite
useful for hikers, we thought it was an added value for everybody ;
    - and "Arbres et haies remarquables" because it is easy and quite
fun :-)

They were speaking having a decision for their "master plan" which
should be adopted in September 2013. But they also added that it will be
easy to add "opendata" items in their master plan if a first experience
works before. So, one of those items could be released before.

The SPW has also a request for our community (this is were flemish
people might be more interested !)

They would like to use OSM to track changes in Wallonia. They would like
to know where to send their teams, where there is some new roads, or
where the roads or elements are modified.

The problem is: how to track those changes ? If I add a new road in OSM,
is it a road build in the past month, or is it a road build years ago,
but which didn't exist in the osm'db ? And if I update a line "highway",
am I correcting some mistake, or adapting our map to some new reality ?

We thought about one solution: a tag "since" to object which are updated
or build in the reality and modified in the db. Example: if a road has a
new bike lane, I update the line with JOSM and add the tag
"since=2013-01-01" on the object. Within SPW, they track the tags
"since" and see where are changes.

What do you think ?

Julien Fastré