[Talk-ca] New member introduction: Vancouver

Adam Williamson adamw at happyassassin.net
Sun Jan 19 22:48:11 UTC 2014


Hi, folks! I thought it'd be a good idea to sign up for the list and
introduce myself, as I've recently started dabbling with contributing to
OSM in my area.

I'm Adam Williamson, I work for Red Hat on the Fedora Linux
distribution, and I live in Joyce-Collingwood in East Vancouver. I'm
mainly interested in 'scratching my own itches', for now at least -
trying to do what I can to make OSM a more viable GMaps alternative for
my uses.

I ride transit, so obviously a big problem is that (AFAIK) there isn't
an OpenTripPlanner server for Vancouver, and I've been looking into the
possibility of running one (I've registered the domain vanplan.ca to
possibly host this in future if it looks viable). I also tend to use
GMaps a lot to look up businesses or other places I'm going to, and
that's the kind of data I'm likely mostly going to be adding to OSM (if
I have the time to keep it up!)

I've set up a user page on the Wiki -
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:AdamWill - and added myself to
the 'Users in Vancouver' category. You can find my initial edits around
the 3300-3500 blocks of Kingsway, if anyone wants to check my work!
Please do drop me a line if you have any tips or advice, I welcome
education ;) As noted on my wiki page, I've been adding factual metadata
about businesses, like addresses, phone numbers and opening hours, and
where I don't have that info in my head or noted down already, I've
sourced it from the businesses' own websites (*not* directories like
yellow pages or urban spoon) - based on the reading I've done I believe
this is legally OK, but please do advise me if I've got that wrong.

I don't have any specialist knowledge about mapping at all - I don't
think I'd ever even heard of 'GIS' until I read it on the OSM wiki... -
so do be gentle and assume very little prior knowledge on my part :) I
am curious to know what efforts experienced Vancouver OSMers (OSMites?
mappies? what's the term? :>) have made to use the data provided by the
various GVRD cities' open data projects - I've seen the wiki page which
lists out several of them, but I couldn't find any notes on whether for
e.g. things like Vancouver's database of street numbers have been / can
be used.

Thanks everyone!
-- 
adamw




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