[Talk-ca] Merging OSM + Geobase (summary)

[Jean-Sébastien Moreau]

Hi all,

This message is an attempt to summarize my understanding of the intense last
week discussions we had about the import process.

There seems to be some kind of consensus about the fact that we want to get the
best out of existing osm objects AND geobase objects. We want a good quality
result and we would like to get it as quickly as possible. There is however a
lack of freely available tools to achieve these goals in an automated manner.

There were also some exchanges about quality of osm versus geobase for the road
network (James and William). It seems that this is not uniform for the entire
canadian landmass. An automatch process should allow local mappers expertise to
be taken into account. As Daniel Bégin added, the uploaded gps tracks for a
given area could be used to check which dataset is the most accurate.

William Lachance generously offered his help in order to develop a tool to do
the automatch. Steve Singer added a first draft of an algorithm that could be
use. I will send some hints based on the experiments with my FME script that
did the match for 21E05 and 31H08. These could be used as input to any
automatch program.

I’ve added a section in the wiki.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GeoBase_Import#AutoMatch_Process

I put the algorithm that Steve has proposed. As William goes on with the
implementation, other more complex cases could be added to this algorithm.

I hope that message will help moving forward.

Jean-Sebastien