[Talk-ca] [Imports] [Import] Ottawa Buildings & Addresses [Statistics Canada project]

[john whelan]

Both the City of Ottawa and the Canadian Federal Government have rules in
place about bribery and corruption.  Buying a civil servant a coffee these
days is one of the forbidden activities.  I do trust you are not suggesting
that illegal methods were used when the data was obtained.

The use of the particular data concerned was first raised by one of the
Open Data specialists at Carlton University at a meeting between many
parties.  Open data guy at the City of Ottawa unfortunately was not present
but the representatives from the City of Ottawa did say it would be looked
into.  Later I spoke to them after the meeting and they thought with the
current climate of cooperation with different government levels there
should not be a problem.

The traditional way to gently refuse something is for it to get lost in the
system.  I haven't seen any signs of that yet.

I think things have moved forward but perhaps not at the pace everyone
might like.

Cheerio John

On 24 Oct 2016 6:03 pm, "James" <james2432 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bjenk(STATS Can) is communicating/pushing with the the city of Ottawa,
> even may resolve to offering coffee bribes to be able to host the shared
> file on open.canada.ca. He's been relentless in his effort to move the
> project forward, but as most Canadian gouvernment entities it moves at a
> snails pace as it is stuck in bureaucratic hell.
>
> On Oct 24, 2016 5:38 PM, "Stewart C. Russell" <scruss at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Christoph,
>>
>> > Could you please clarify what the alleged source of the building data to
>> > be imported is?
>>
>> Yes, as far as I understand it, at least: these data to be imported were
>> given to a group of OSM contributors by the City of Ottawa. They have
>> explicit permission to include it in OSM from the City. The only place
>> you can inspect the data is on the contributors' own hosting sites, as
>> the city doesn't host it anywhere. Details of the licence and
>> permissions are on the Ottawa import information page.
>>
>> > What is shown in
>> >
>> > https://gist.github.com/scruss/5a3f469c47df5d27fdba28258c273b45
>> >
>> > does not match geometry-wise.
>>
>> I know. That link was derived from the city's own topo database from
>> 2011, which *is* published on the city's open data website. I have a
>> feeling that the city doesn't want to give away their 2016 topo database
>> — not realising that by allowing the 2016 building outlines to be
>> imported into OSM, they kind of *are* giving away the current database ...
>>
>> The public 2011 data set is cut into 2×1 km tiles, slicing through
>> buildings on the border. There are no common attributes which would
>> allow repair, as the data is packaged in AutoCAD DWG files.
>>
>> So the options are:
>>
>> 1. Import from a current source that we have OSM contributors' word that
>> was provided by the city under a permissive licence, or
>>
>> 2. Import from a data set that is published on the City website but is
>> possibly outdated, is in a horrible file format, has no documentation or
>> metadata (apart from the licence) and would need a large amount of
>> cleanup to be remotely usable.
>>
>> If [2] is the only option, I have a feeling that the Canadian federal
>> government, the City of Ottawa and Open North (the open data advocacy
>> group providing coding and community liaison support) would be strongly
>> disinclined to work with or support OSM again. Worst of all, the tiny
>> Canadian OSM community might lose some very dedicated mappers if this
>> process puts them off contributing again.
>>
>> cheers,
>>  Stewart
>>
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