[Talk-ca] BC2020 Open Data and Data Mirroring

john whelan jwhelan0112 at gmail.com
Thu Mar 29 19:14:20 UTC 2018


Data licensing issues are best dealt with on osm talk mailing list  talk@
openstreetmap.org.  talk-ca has no authority over them.

Governments are not a single entity.  In Ottawa there are at least three
parts of the City that handle geo data.  They are not in sync.
OpenStreetMap in general is about as accurate as most government agencies
provided the data is in it.  There is some information such as the location
of a defibrillator that I feel really needs to be formally verified but for
the location of a bicycle repair station or coffee shop with wifi I'd be
happy with OSM.

There are issues about data quality and even in Canada we've seen invented
towns drawn in the middle of nowhere but over time these do get corrected.
We are getting better at running overpass queries to pick up suspicious
work by the way including duplicated buildings.

CANVEC data comes from multiple internal government sources.  Some are
better than others.  The update cycle is such that one source may update
its geo data but that update is not carried over to the next level until
that level needs to update.  My understanding is parts of CANVEC are from
20 years old surveys.

For some government agencies getting access to data is problematic.  More
than half the data consumed through the TB Open Data portal is by other
government departments.

In some parts of the world OSM is for all practical purposes the only geo
data available.  There are tool sets that can be used with OpenStreetMap
and certainly some Local Governments in Zambia are happily using
OpenStreetMap and contributing to it.

Stats Canada's use of OpenStreetMap would seem to be reasonable.  There
isn't really an economic case for having Stats hire its own staff to count
levels of buildings.  Some of the information is available in other places
within local, provincial or even federal government but uncovering it and
getting permission to use it is time consuming.

So its not perfect but on the whole it works.

Cheerio John

On 28 March 2018 at 13:04, Jonathan Brown <jonabrow at gmail.com> wrote:

> Lessons learned from Finland and Poland in using OSM and Open Data:
> https://blog.core.okfn.org/2018/03/28/open-data-day-2018-
> getting-the-local-communities-in-porto-and-helsinki-to-talk-
> about-open-mapping/
>
>
>
> Also, the research by Professor Peter Johnson at Waterloo on models of
> direct editing of government spatial data is germane to the BC2020 mapathon
> events. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15230406.2016.1176536
>
> Two issues related to licensing:
>
>    1. data ownership and license may permit or restrict government usage
>    of contributed data, integration with existing government data, and hamper
>    its ability to share data with others, particularly under an open license.
>    Governments may face issues with accepting data from individuals through
>    their own data collection system as users would need to acknowledge that
>    they claim no right to the data or the database. Without such a clause,
>    government would be at risk of having data contributors potentially remove
>    their edits from a database.
>    2. A second challenge would come from the integration of part or all
>    of a separate database, such as OSM into a government database, which is
>    then provided under a separate license than OSM (Saunders, Scassa, and
>    Lauriault 2012). OSM currently uses a license that has a share-alike
>    clause, where any significant portion of the OSM data incorporated into a
>    “derivative” database must continue to be licensed under the same Open
>    Database License (ODbL v.1.0), including a share-alike clause. This means
>    that any derivative data set must then be shared with the same or
>    compatible licensing as the current OSM database (for more information, see
>    https://wiki.osmfoundation. org/wiki/License). Through a complex and
>    emerging field of database licensing law and compatibility, this
>    share-alike clause may restrict the potential for blended OSM-government
>    data products to be created as this derivative database would need to be
>    contributed back to OSM and be made available under a separate license than
>    from the government open data license. For example, the United States
>    Geologic Survey (USGS) notes that they cannot integrate OSM data into the
>    USGS National Map since OSM data uses a Creative Commons Share-Alike
>    license, while their work needs to be under the public domain (Wolf,
>    McNinch, and Poore 2011).
>
>
>
> For the Durham Region Mapathon even that has been rescheduled for May 3,
> we could use crowdsourcing and data mirroring (below) based on the feedback
> I got from Professor Johnson who has demonstrated the value of open
> municipal data and GIS to local K-12 classroom teachers and students.
>
>
>
> Peter explores the following four models for inputting geospatial data
> into government databases in the above paper:
>
>    1. status quo of open data
>    2. data curation
>    3. data mirroring
>    4. acceptance of external crowdsourced data.
>
>
>
> Potential Issues with crowdsourcing:
>
>    - “jurisdictionality of contribution, anonymity, and indeed the
>    authority of contributors to make changes are all relevant in the instance
>    that government were to adopt OSM. Through using OSM as a source of not
>    only geospatial data, but as a conduit for edits, government shifts power
>    over data creation and editing outside the walls of city hall.” (see page
>    7).
>
>
>
> Jonathan
>
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> Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
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>
>
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