[Talk-ca] Cleaning up after the GeoBase import

[William Lachance]

On Sat, 2009-06-13 at 10:28 -0400, Gerald A wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 1:36 AM, Corey Burger <corey.burger at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>         <snip
>         > 1) start fresh (streets/road-wise), enjoy correct topology
>         and overall
>         > consistency for the whole Canada from the start, and
>         correct/add to out-of-date data from GeoBase.
>         
>         </snip>

> I have to agree with this feeling -- having done a bit of work in my
> local area, it would more then annoy me if it was all deleted for some
> supposedly more "authoritative" work. 
> 
> We're looking for the best map, not the map that is the fastest to get
> up. Tiger, which contains far more data then Geobase, used a
> complimentary approach, IIRC. 

My understanding from talking to one of the main people responsible for
the Tiger import (Brandon Martin Anderson) is that there wasn't much
data in place in the U.S. when the Tiger import started, hence this was
much less of an issue at least at the time. I'm not sure what they're
doing now (how often does Tiger even update their data?).

In any case, we're going to need to solve the problem of how to
reconcile the (amazing) GeoBase work with the (also amazing) work of OSM
volunteers for the forseeable future. It's not like there aren't
inaccuracies in both data sets (not to mention the fact that the road
network continues to be developed). Furthermore, this problem is _not_
limited to Canada. Increasingly, this is going to be a global issue as
more and more government agencies worldwide see the light and make their
GIS data publicly available.

In my opinion, we'd do better to write the software and create the
processes that facilitate the ongoing merging of data from the two
sources now, rather than dream about scenarios where these problems
don't exist.
-- 
William Lachance <wrlach at gmail.com>