[Talk-ca] Aylmer/Hull QC: CanVec import overwriting existing edits

[Jonathan Crowe]

This is rather discouraging and frustrating.

When the Bing imagery was made available, I spent a fair amount of
time cleaning up the maps in Aylmer, Quebec, a western suburb of
Gatineau. Just discovered that my edits have been overwritten by
another user importing CanVec data.

This import has introduced hundreds of errors:

- Proposed and under-construction streets are shown as completed.
- Streets are tagged as unclassified.
- Service roads have been removed altogether.
- Turning circles and traffic signals are missing.
- Certain streets do not line up with high-resolution Bing imagery,
and not in an off-by-a-few-metres way -- for example, the Bing image
has a subtle S-curve, the CanVec data has a rather crude straight line
bisecting the curve.

This means that Aylmer now needs dozens of person-hours to get it back
to where it was -- and at this point I'm discouraged enough to say the
hell with this project and find something better to do with my spare
time.

Much of Ottawa is in a similar state: manual edits superimposed with
CanVec imports that may or may not have been more accurate, and now
there are two or three duplicates on top of one another. It's a mess,
and it's in no way ready for MapQuest.

I thought CanVec imports were frowned upon when there was existing road data?

I'll tell you this: this is not the way to encourage people to
contribute, if all the work we do with imagery is subject to
obliteration by someone else's work with government vector data.

Yours in frustration,

Jonathan Crowe
The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps
http://www.maproomblog.com/