[Talk-ca] Building Import

Thu Mar 28 03:23:02 UTC 2019

The patchwork of municipalities is at least useful, before we didn't have a
framework for adding this data, but at least we do now thanks to the
umbrella license @ Stats Canada. We're a big country with very few, but
very skilled OSM mappers (IE gecho111
<https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/gecho111> mapped all of regina's
building footprints! ).

I like the concept of the Bing data, but they may have to do another few
tries, or maybe retain their Neural network. - Is there anywhere where the
Bing data looks nice? I found burbs in Winnipeg not bad, but there's some
really weird elements when the source data is too simple (buildings in the
middle of fields) or too complex (urban cores)

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 6:29 AM John Whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Stats Canada data comes from the municipalities.  Unfortunately there
> are over 3,000 in Canada so yes ideally each would be treated separately in
> reality each municipality doesn't have a group of skilled OSM mappers who
> are capable of setting up an import plan and doing the work although there
> is nothing to stop them doing so.
>
> Cheerio John
>
> keith hartley wrote on 2019-03-27 12:00 AM:
>
> Hi All,
> I like the idea of imports, and think there's a lot of value of batch
> importing - however we need to run a QA/AC for each. For Manitoba I think
> the challenge is getting municipalities to sign on, and move their data to
> the canadian open data portal (that is, if they have data or any
> geo-spatial information to give ) some information is on the provincial
> level, but most of that has already been added to OSM (IE Brandon, Selkirk)
> or have been built.
>
> Reviewing some of the Microsoft data, I see a lot of quirks! - IF using it
> it's handy to identify buildings, but would REALLY have to watch and review
> if importing any of it to osm. I'm not sure about the rest of canada, but
> there's "swamp buildings" that some of my collegues have dubbed 1/3 mile
> polygons in a featureless field.  Some of the more complex downtown
> buildings seem pretty broken, but the data does seem to be decent at
> covering suburban areas.
>
> TL/DR version:
>
> I'd be comfortable importing muni stuff (dependent on quality) , but the
> Bing footprints would have to be reviewed, nearly on a building by building
> level.
>
> Keith
>
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 4:24 PM john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> At least it is an indication of interest.
>>
>> Thanks John
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:57 PM Darren Wiebe, <darren at aleph-com.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm from rural Alberta close to Lloydminster.  The building import is
>>> something that interests me and would be useful in my area but I haven't
>>> been very actively mapping over the last year or two.  Hopefully there are
>>> Alberta mappers on here who are much more active than I have been.
>>>
>>> Darren Wiebe
>>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 2:04 PM John Whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think my concerns are to do with the "black box" approach.  Knowing
>>>> your background I trust your work but others might not.
>>>>
>>>> On a technical side I get the impression that cites with buildings that
>>>> are close to each other are problematical.  I assume that small locations
>>>> with a population of say under 125,000 this is an insignificant problem?
>>>>
>>>> The other issue is I'd like to either see buy in from Nate or at least
>>>> some Toronto mappers to get an indication that something will happen at the
>>>> end of the day as it is a fair chunk of Daniel's time to work out how do
>>>> the preprocessing.
>>>>
>>>> I think some BC mappers expressed some doubts as well so perhaps they
>>>> would like to think about if they are happy or would prefer BC to be
>>>> outside of the import project and express their views.
>>>>
>>>> Out of interest if it does move ahead are we including the Microsoft
>>>> data for areas where we do not have data from Stats Canada?  If so we will
>>>> need to amend the project plan.
>>>>
>>>> My personal view is realistically I think having building information
>>>> even if its a meter or two out is better than not having the building
>>>> outlines.
>>>>
>>>> What would be nice is if we could have some indication from places such
>>>> as Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec excluding Montreal, Ontario
>>>> excluding Toronto and the other provinces and territories whether they are
>>>> happy with importing the buildings either from Stats or Microsoft.
>>>>
>>>> I seem to recall Keith is in Manitoba, so any views other than it
>>>> wasn't present in the first release from Stats?
>>>>
>>>> Note to Alessandro this is just background stuff.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>>
>>>> Cheerio John
>>>>
>>>> Begin Daniel wrote on 2019-03-26 3:29 PM:
>>>>
>>>> Jarek,
>>>> The area you proposed in quite interesting and will force me to look further at buildings with sharing edges, a concern Pierre also had. I'll be back soon with your area processed.
>>>> Daniel
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Begin Daniel [mailto:jfd553 at hotmail.com <jfd553 at hotmail.com>]
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2019 14:34
>>>> To: Jarek Piórkowski; talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
>>>> Subject: Re: [Talk-ca] Building Import
>>>>
>>>> Jarek,
>>>> Since it is a one-time process, I expect to be able to process the files if the community feels comfortable with it. In the meantime, people are welcome to send me the bounding box of an area they would like to examine.
>>>>
>>>> Daniel
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Jarek Piórkowski [mailto:jarek at piorkowski.ca <jarek at piorkowski.ca>]
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2019 13:46
>>>> To: Begin Daniel; talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
>>>> Subject: Re: [Talk-ca] Building Import
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, 26 Mar 2019 at 13:10, Begin Daniel <jfd553 at hotmail.com> <jfd553 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> There is actually no standard “code” available since I use FME (www.safe.com). It is a proprietary ETL application and all operations are done using “transformers” (https://www.safe.com/transformers/). I can provide you with the workbench I developed (a bunch of linked transformers) but you need a license to run it. This is why I tried to describe the operations I run on the data in the wiki.
>>>>
>>>> As you did, people may send me coordinates (bounding box) of an area they know well. I’ll process the area and send the results back in OSM format. Please, be reasonable on the amount of data to process ;-)
>>>>
>>>> Thanks Daniel. Let me know how it looks then!
>>>>
>>>> Coming from an open-source background, the process is unusual to me,
>>>> and I have questions about scalability - will you be able to process
>>>> and provide updated data files for all of Canada then? - but if others
>>>> are comfortable with it then I won't object.
>>>>
>>>> Some general thoughts regarding tooling as raised upthread:
>>>>
>>>> I was initially excited to see building footprints data as they help
>>>> two quite distinct purposes:
>>>>
>>>> 1. they provide a mostly-automatic source of geometries for the
>>>> millions of single-family houses that wouldn't be mapped in the next
>>>> decade otherwise
>>>>
>>>> 2. they might provide a corrected and fairly accurate source of
>>>> geometries in heavily-built-up areas, where GPS signal is not that
>>>> reliable and it can be really difficult to get sufficiently accurate
>>>> geometries from imagery, whether because it's not sufficiently
>>>> high-resolution, two sets of imagery with conflicting offsets (Bing
>>>> and Esri are the two best sets in Toronto, and they're off by about
>>>> 1-2 m on north-south axis from each other - that's not something I can
>>>> check with a consumer-grade GPS so I'm left guessing as to which is
>>>> true), or non-vertical imagery (I can count the floors on supposedly
>>>> top-down imagery in some cases).
>>>>
>>>> >From what I saw, imports in the GTHA initially focused on the first
>>>> case, and I think the Tasking Manager setup was mostly sufficient for
>>>> those - where there is nothing currently on the map, or a few simple
>>>> 2D geometries, a 4 sq km area can feasibly be done in under an hour.
>>>>
>>>> However, as raised by others, I would really want the working squares
>>>> in Old Toronto for example to be no more than 500 m x 500 m, or no
>>>> more than 1 km x 1 km in St. Catharines. I would _love_ to have the
>>>> geometries to manually compare and adjust the 3D buildings already
>>>> existing in the area, but it will be much slower.
>>>>
>>>> --Jarek
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