[Talk-ca] Automated imports of Canvec?

James Ewen ve6srv at gmail.com
Thu Dec 15 22:24:19 GMT 2011


On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:

> I think that OSM will be "complete, and in maintenance mode" once we
> have a mapper on every block.

And in what dream world do you live? With a population of 34 million,
and an area just under 10 million square kilometres, we've got a long
way to go to have one mapper on every block. Right now if every single
person in Canada contributed to OSM each person would need to look
after more than 0.25 square kilometres of area. We really don't have
that kind of participation level in Canada yet. Even if we did, would
you be willing to wander up to Ellesmere Island and wander about your
assigned chunk of land with your GPS, and gather all the pertinent
data for inclusion in the OSM database?

> Yes.  That's a grand goal.  As more and
> more places approach that grand goal, the local data gets better and
> better.  Few important things can change in the real world without a
> mapper noticing and updating OSM.

Maybe, perhaps if you're lucky you might find a few places where there
might be a congregation of mappers and it may look like there are lots
of helping hands available. For the most part Canada is sparsely
populated. Most of the population lives along the US border.

If your goal is to map out the densely populated portion of the
country and leave the rest a blank slate, then perhaps your goal is
attainable. For the rest of us who do not live in the sardine can, the
task of mapping the rest of that blank slate is a wholly unattainable
goal within our lifetime, the lifetime of our children, their
children, and probably even their children. There are millions of
square km of wilderness that have never been travelled by humans, and
remote sensing is the most cost effective way of mapping the area.
Canvec has that data already in hand. In what world does it make sense
to reinvent the wheel?

Pull in Canvec data in areas where there's no data available, and as
mappers have the time, ability, and inclination, updates and changes
can be made to increase the accuracy of the data included in the OSM
database.

> While data-processing tools have improved with every generation, I
> don't think that "insufficient automation" is the problem.

It sure would help. I'm standing as far away from the fence as I can
on this issue... well onto the build that tool side. I'm probably one
of the "problem children" causing issues importing Canvec data because
I lack the knowledge of how to fix all the errors that are reported by
JOSM. I can't even find out where the errors are to fix them, so I
import and then go back with Potlatch because I know how to get that
program to work.

BTW, I'm not flying to Toronto to go to an OSM gathering to learn how
to run JOSM...

> I'm willing to listen to reason (well, _I_ think I'm reasonable,)

Yes, you are, and you have a lot of valuable insight, and reasoned arguements.

To get some insight into the task at hand, please map out the City of
Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. It is in need of additional detail, such
as the city streets. It's only 65 square kilometres, so it's not much
more than your share of Canada to map if we were able to get 5% of the
Canadian population to work on mapping Canada.

> So far we haven't got strong data to support or refute that imports
> harm OSM community vs. imports are better than no data.

I guess we just stop doing anything and see if there's any change.

> How about considering a partial import in some places.

We've done that in Alberta. The roads were imported in areas where
there was nothing before. There's a bunch of work to do to fix where
the import stopped and low resolution tracing was left in place.
That's getting done slowly. In the mean time, there's data on the map,
rather than a blank slate.

I still go out of my way to gather GPS tracks and upload them to OSM.
I make a bunch of detours into the pull offs and rest areas along the
major highways now, to gather information that isn't available in the
Canvec data. I can concentrate on adding detail, rather than having to
try and splash copious quantities of low quality data across the
province to try and get "something" on the map.

-- 
James
VE6SRV



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