[Talk-ca] (no subject)

john whelan jwhelan0112 at gmail.com
Sat Jan 19 18:48:20 UTC 2019


 There was an earlier discussion on talk-ca about how to handle this
project.

It is similar to CANVEC in the original data sources are municipal data
CANVEC uses a few other sources as well and it is released under exactly
the same license but by a different federal government department.

There are 3,700 municipalities in Canada. How do you deal with that?  A
suggestion was made on talk-ca we have one import plan that way it would at
least be consistent and that's what we did.

Mentally I'd split the project into getting an import plan that met all the
requirements and the actual importing.  To me the importing would be done
by local mappers or mappers with a local connection after a local
discussion which is what happened in Kingston.  For locations that did not
have such mappers then over time they could be tackled at a distance. One
comment I recall was this was more of a marathon and to be honest we
expected it to take place over a fair length of time.  A lot of buildings
have gone in much faster than I expected.

For the pilot project with Ottawa the local Ottawa mappers were heavily
involved.  We learnt a fair bit on the way and that's why we basically
cloned the Ottawa import plan.  We noticed a lot of additional tags being
added to the building=yes and that to be was a good thing in that it drew
more people into OSM. I'm much more interested in those additional tags
than anything else.

As far as I am aware there is no list of local OSM communities in Canada
and to be honest many mappers simply map and do not gather once a month at
OSM meetings.

I don't think we do an import plan every time we bring something across
from CANVEC.

Unfortunately there really is a demand for this sort of information.  The
initial 2020 meeting that took place at Stats Canada during the HOT summit
in Ottawa had many people from government departments who were very
interested in the data and especially what I call enriched data, ie
buildings with addresses and other tags.  Smaller school boards have
expressed an interest in routing school buses using this sort of data.
There is an app for the blind that guides you to the building but the
building and address have to be on the map.

Should we care what end users are interested in?  I think that is a
separate discussion.

There always has been a range of views within OpenStreetMap.  I have
certainly been taken to task for changing a tag from traffic_lights to
traffic_signals.  "I mapped it and I tagged it traffic_lights and it should
remain that way."  Toronto was almost certainly going to be troublesome.  I
recall someone saying once if you gather five book classifiers together
they will find six ways to classify a book. The Ottawa community is
reasonably small and many meet up from time to time.  In a city such as
Toronto my expectation would be a much wider range of opinions. This makes
it very difficult to identify if something is approved or not. It also
means that my expectation that the importing mapper will use a bit of
common sense and we shouldn't need to spell out things like "replace
geometry tool" other mappers will have other expectations.

My understanding of importing or drawing a building outline from imagery is
it gets tagged building=yes and you can do no better from imagery.
Occasionally you might see a building in a residential area that has two
drives, I might just tag that semi.

Then we throw in the 2020 project. Stats initial idea was to simply have
every building mapped in Canada with iD and mapathons were a wonderful
idea.  Technically it is possible to accurately map a building from imagery
with iD I've seen it done.  You may wish to talk to Pierre about data
quality from those mapathons.

I had talked to Stats about getting the building outlines released under a
suitable license.  It only took a year to persuade the City of Ottawa to
change their Open Data license to one that worked with OpenStreetMap.

Stats came back some time later by releasing some building outline data
under the federal government Open Data license and that's where this bit
started.

The 2020 project has a lot of interest from GIS departments, High Schools
are thinking of how to get involved with their students.  Adding tags is a
lot safer and less error prone than drawing buildings in iD.  Education is
one area that Stats gets brownie points for so they like to promote it.

Microsoft has been running the same algorithms on Canada as it has in the
US.  We can expect their building outlines to be released shortly.

Data quality, by the time its been converted from one format to another and
comes form a variety of systems some municipal data will be better than
others. The data I've looked at looks reasonable however my expectations
and your expectations maybe different.

You might like to add a step or two into the wiki.

We could do a table in the wiki with a list of communities that feel
comfortable with the import. That might be troublesome, two high school
students meet over coffee,"hey this is a great idea." they have osm
memberships and mark the community as having approved.  Has the local
community approved or not?

My feeling is there is a lot of support for the project, how do we tap into
that support and move forward?

Thoughts?

Thanks John
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