[Talk-ca] Sam's Status Update of all goings on OSM related :-)

[James Ewen]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Neskie Manuel<neskiem at gmail.com> wrote:

> I could help with this.  I want to know if anyone imported the
> Aborignal Lands data from GeoBase and if not why?

Do you really require an explanation from every single person that did
NOT import Aboriginal Lands into the database?

My answer would be "Because I haven't gotten there yet.", as I would
suspect would be the same answer from a lot of people. We had a pretty
blank slate not that long ago, and there is an overwhelming amount of
data being imported currently, let alone the total sum of information
that could be included in the OSM database.

There are only so many hours in the day, and most people work on this
as a hobby. Most of the bulk import is being done by a small handful
of individuals. Many hands make light work.

If you are interested in importing the Aboriginal lands, I'm sure that
hundreds of us would be willing to encourage you to do so. More data
is good data, especially when the more data being added is "good data"
in the sense that it adds value to the database!


> I would like to work on
> importing this data.  Therre are about 613 Aboriginal communities in
> Canada with Reserves associated with each one.  I could start a
> planning page to layout the import.  I already altered the
> geobase2osm.py script to a geobase2osm_al.py  and it does the job, but
> it needs a bit more work, since this script would be producing areas
> and not ways.

Hmm, how do you define an area without creating a way to define the
boundary? Import one of the reserves, and point us to it to see what
it looks like on the map and in the database (it might not show on the
map if the style sheets don't yet support it)... We'll let you know
what we think.

If you've got the script set up with what are considered good rules,
the next step would be to run the script to import the aboriginal
lands areas.

The information is definitely an important part of the geographic
fabric of Canada.

James
VE6SRV