[Talk-ca] importing geobase data for the Canadian boarder

[James Ewen]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Ben Konrath <ben at bagu.org> wrote:
> Ok, I did some more poking around and it seems that the land border
> with the US is really borked. For BC and Alberta, there are 3 - 4
> different border lines with the US. I'm willing to do the work
> required to clean this up by deleting the lines that don't make sense.
> I just need to know if the Geobase information is the best one to use
> for the border?

I did a little poking around on this a couple months ago, but never
got going on cleaning things up... I checked with the International
Border Commission about using the IBC monument locations for defining
the Canada/USA common border.

My query was replied to by:

Doug Culham O.L.S., C.L.S.
Canada Centre for Cadastral Management
Earth Sciences Sector

who gave permission for use of the monument locations. My idea was to
simply compare the IBC monument locations with the GeoBase locations.
I did this for a handful of sites along the BC border near the
continental divide, and found them to be congruent.

Defining the international boundary is pretty easy, but then you have
to figure out where the state, and county boundaries end up. A number
of these are defined as polygons, with varying degrees of accuracy.
What should happen IMHO is that the international boundary should be
defined, and then the provincial/state/county borders be defined as
relations along the appropriate sections of the international border.

James
VE6SRV