[Talk-ca] Toronto Potential Datasource

[Andrew MacKinnon]

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Sam Vekemans
<acrosscanadatrails at gmail.com> wrote:
> hi All,
> It looks like the City of Toronto just joined in the cool-club :-)
>
> Thanks to user:Aude who looks to be a wikipedian... maybe could fix my
> ramblings? :-)... lol ... maybe not..
>  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Aude

Great, so I wasted the last several years mapping Toronto :)

(I am exaggerating here, because there is a huge amount of data which
simply isn't available in these datasets, and must be added manually.
For example, the location of shops and other businesses.)

Looks like there is a huge amount of data here. Road centerlines,
addresses, park boundaries, some recreational trails, rivers, churches
and a few other things are all in shapefile format and can be imported
easily. The challenging part will be combining this data with data
that was mapped by hand or that is from GeoBase. Unfortunately, as far
as I can tell, the road data does not include grade separations
(bridges/tunnels), it represents dual carriageways as a single way,
and it does not include one way streets (unless I am missing
something).

TTC routes and schedules are available, but in a weird undocumented
text format (not Google Transit Feed Specification or something
standard like that). I have absolutely no idea how we will import this
data.

Various other data, such as property parcels and aerial imagery
(hopefully higher quality than Yahoo) is available through a Web
Mapping Service - it suggests that you use ArcGIS Explorer
(proprietary software) to view it. I'm not sure if there is any way to
view it with free software. Since this is presumably raster data, it
will have to wait until later.

The CanVec data is junk compared to the City of Toronto data, so I
think we'd be best off not importing it at all.

Since this is such a complex job, I think that we need to arrange some
sort of meetup (either in person or on IRC) to discuss how we will do
this import.

Andrew MacKinnon