[Talk-ca] Toronto Potential Datasource

[Andrew MacKinnon]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 9:14 PM, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:
> Take another look.  Parts of the road centreline data are at least
> years out of date.  And the centerline data freely mixes roads with
> geographic boundaries with rivers, some sharing "junctions".  That'll
> be a mess to convert properly.

> I think the addressing data will be a nice addition to OSM.  They
> haven't released the parcel data yet, but they have it and might
> release it.  The TTC data is for street cars and buses only so far.

The centerlines data is up to date - it shows several roads that I
know were built recently e.g. the Simcoe Street extension under the
train tracks and the renaming of part of Duncan St to Ed Mirvish Way.
However, we are probably best off keeping the existing road data (most
of it manually added by me from GeoBase NRN), and not attempting to
use data from the "centerlines" shapefile because the city centerlines
data shows dual carriageways as one road and does not show grade
separations, unlike the GeoBase data. There is no reason that we can't
copy missing features from it though.

There is quite a lot of raster data in the WMS layer "City GeoSpatial
Web Service". This includes much of the data in the shapefiles, such
as road centerlines, trails (though some minor trails are missing or
inaccurate), rivers (with names, many of which are missing in OSM
right now), and address data. It also includes parcels, but only in
raster format. It might be useful to trace features from here in JOSM.

The TTC data is pretty much useless to us because it is in a weird
non-documented format. Would the TTC be willing to allow us to copy
directly from its website, which includes route data in a much more
user-friendly format?

Andrew