[Talk-ca] Administrative boundaries of Québec

[Frank Steggink]

Hi Nicolas,

Nicolas Gignac wrote:
>
> The contact I had in the government of Quebec have raised issues on 
> delivering up-to-date datasets in OSM, such as the Administrative 
> boundaries of Québec (BDGA).
> Could someone help this person to understand quickly the advantage for 
> his organisation to share its data with the OSM community.
>
I'm not sure if there will be a direct advantage to his organization, 
but making this data publicly available would be hugely advantageous to 
the people of Quebec and others who have interest in it. In my opinion 
this is actually a public service. Administrative boundaries; knowing in 
what territory you are; are an important part of our lives. It is true 
that they already make a generalized version available at no cost, but 
in that case it can't be easily mixed with other data available through 
OSM, today and in the future. This also opens the way for a very broad 
range of possible applications. An example of this are the 
user-generated city maps of maposmatic.org. It is hard to predict what 
will come of it, but I'm sure there are people who will create really 
interesting applications based on this data.
>
> Here are some of his reserve :
> - He does not want his administration to be wrongly identified as the 
> contributor if someone of OSM edit his data that has been integrated 
> in OSM;
>
Of all features the history is kept, so it can easily be checked who 
edited the data. When something is wrong, that person should be 
contacted first, and when that can't happen for some reason, the person 
doing the import will probably be contacted, or an e-mail will be sent 
to this list. I don't expect that anyone would contact the government of 
Quebec directly.
>
> - He does want an attribution somewhere;
>
The source tag can be used for that. Alternatively, a source tag can be 
added to the changeset at import, although it will be harder to track. 
And of course the organization can be mentioned on the Import/Catalogue 
page in the wiki.
>
> - He does not want someone to call his administration because their is 
> an error in the data when it was someone of OSM that has edited the 
> data, not his organisation;
> - He is willing to cooperate, but he has issue when users edit his 
> data and his organisation is wrongly identified has the producer.
>
See above.
And, as Yves mentioned, the data is (currently) licensed as CC-BY-SA, so 
although it originates form him, and there will be attribution (the 
BY-clause), the data can be edited by other persons, as long as those 
changes are released with the same or a similar license (the SA-clause). 
The ODbL license, which is still under development, is of a similar 
nature. That is the idea of open data, (as opposed as making data 
downloadable free of charge.
>
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Nicolas
>
Regards,

Frank