[Talk-ca] Import mess in southern Québec

[Frank Steggink]

Hi Yves,

FWIW, I was able to browse the site, in order to see what is available 
and at what cost, with Ubuntu / Firefox. Maybe you have some extensions 
(like NoScript) blocking something. For one, I had to allow JS to be 
executed, but that's all.

Regarding the infrastructure, there are already several instances where 
it is provided by the OSM community. The current efforts to map Haiti 
are located outside of OSM (on a site from Schuyler Erle), but there are 
also several sites serving data for different purposes within OSM. A 
good example are the Dutch sites (like tiles.openstreetmap.nl, 
mijndev.openstreetmap.nl, etc.), and a site like 
http://ooc.openstreetmap.org/ offering tiles of out-of-copyright data 
covering England and Wales.

It has already been mentioned several times, but it would be the best if 
we would be able to set something up ourselves. This would also be very 
beneficial for the Canvec/Geobase and other imports taking place. But 
then the question arises: who can provide a server, and who can 
administer it? (Unfortunately my experience is limited to administrating 
my own PCs, but a more professional web server is beyond my league.) 
This goes beyond offering storage space, although that remains valuable. 
For on, I would love to put my TopOSM version of Canada there, which I 
showed in Sherbrooke last month. On such a site we could show how 
certain data will look like when imported, for example the 
administrative boundaries Nicolas pointed out.

Frank

Yves Moisan wrote:
>> 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 :)
>>     
>
> Good point !  I don't know how Yahoo can provide the data to OSM for
> free for tracing purposes and in other circumstances sell it to private
> customers.  The Québec air photo data may be a different beast inasmuch
> as IIRC there is one single private provider.  
>
> One thing I would try to find out is how much money the government of
> Québec (Geoboutique is the government) makes out of selling the air
> photo coverage it paid for.  The logic is pretty basic here : the
> government wants to recoup costs.  I'll put my toe in water and put
> forth this hypothesis : Geoboutique doesn't make a whole lot of money
> selling air photos.  There.  Please prove me wrong.  If they don't get
> much money from sales (and please let's factor in the cost of the
> computing infrastructure needed to sell the data), then there may be
> open ears for sharing data for community purposes.
>
> The other thing is I'm not sure there is a strong will from the
> government to set up an infrastructure to share it's geodata.  If there
> is to be a special agreement between OSM and the government for tracing
> purposes, there will be a need for such an infrastructure.  
>
> I just dropped by Geoboutique and I can't get much out of their website
> on my Ubuntu laptop : "Ce site est optimisé pour le fureteur Internet
> Explorer version 6.".  In fact I complained two years ago that
> Geoboutique (or some other geodata government site) *required* not only
> IE, but Microsoft's JVM for it to work properly.  A year later Firefox
> users were simply told to use IETab to view the site ...  The site says
> not it is "optimized" for IE6.  Point is : the logic here is
> proprietary, cost-recouping and IE oriented infrastructure.  And it'll
> probably be like that for as long as politicians want even though data
> sales are probably nowhere near what they'd need to be to recover costs.
>
> Prove me wrong ;-).
>
> Yves
>
>   
>> Frank
>>     
>
>
>
>