[Talk-ca] Import mess in southern Québec

[Frank Steggink]

Hi,

Regarding government contacts: I believe Nicolas has contacts within the 
government himself, so he might be in the best position to make some 
inquiries. It would be wonderful if we could do something really useful 
with it (i.e. importing in OSM).

I've looked at the 1:1M data, and it is in E00 format. With some tools 
(Import71 from ESRI and ogr2ogr) I was able to convert it to SHP, and 
then I used shp-to-osm.jar to convert it to OSM files. So far I haven't 
used any rules files, so I got the bare geometry. Maybe I haven't done 
right in this quick test, but the OSM files don't contain areas, but 
lines. Actually this is perfect for administrative boundaries. Any 
administrative areas should be built up by relationships anyways.

Regarding the accuracy, it was much better than I would expect because 
of the scale. If there would be no alternative, this would certainly be 
acceptable IMHO.

One thing though: I couldn't find any names of the areas. The generated 
DBF files only contain numeric identifiers. During the conversion to SHP 
(through ArcInfo coverages) I got an error from ogr2ogr that it wasn't 
able to convert integer lists to SHP. I don't know the data, so I also 
don't know what data has been dropped. Maybe the identifiers of the area 
to the left and right sides of each way...

The Geoboutique site also has lots of other interesting data, like 
orthophotos. Too bad they're expensive. $65 per file, and there are 
thousands of them. However, we wouldn't "need" that data per se, but if 
it would only be available to OSM for tracing purposes (like Yahoo), 
that would already be very much appreciated :)

Frank

Sam Vekemans wrote:
> So Quebec (province) has not opened up their dataset yet?
> Good to know.
> Maybe after the NRCan data all gets imported, they might change their mind :)
>
> Does anyone have contact with the GIS department directly?
>
> Sam
>
> On 1/15/10, Pierre-Luc Beaudoin <pierre-luc at pierlux.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 22:18 -0500, Pierre-Luc Beaudoin wrote:
>>     
>>> We should get in touch with them so we can exchange datasets such as
>>> Municipalités régionales de comté, City boundaries, counties and
>>> administrative regions (at least).
>>>       
>> They do have the data (1/20 000) in vector format available for sale for
>> 100$ + conversion rates of 7$ on http://geoboutique.mrnf.gouv.qc.ca .
>> Past that, it's only a question of licences.
>>
>> Pierre-Luc
>>
>>     
>
>
>