[Talk-ca] Importing buildings in Canada

Fri Sep 27 18:59:34 UTC 2019

I'll try to sum up my understanding.

Currently your view is the existing import plan for Canada building 
imports does not meet the import guidelines and cannot be amended to 
meet them.  I was hoping that something might have happened in the last 
six months on the preprocessing of data side which would have meant we 
could have got a consensus to move forward but no movement on this has 
apparently happened.

Second no consensus exists for importing all the buildings or how it 
should be done.  My personal view is originally I didn't think this was 
achievable for all Canada.  There were simply too many players and 
getting complete unanimous consensus was always going to be a problem 
but it was found the most difficult part of the Ottawa buildings import 
was the import mailing list and the OSM guidelines for imports so based 
on input from outside the original Ottawa group the decision was made to 
go for a Canada wide import plan to minimise the requirements for 
multiple people to submit import plans.  The technical side of the 
import by comparison was fairly simple and much more interesting.  So it 
was worth trying a country wide import plan.

The Ottawa import was thrashed out over coffee and the local mappers are 
happy with the data quality even though some non-local mappers were not.

I still have reservations about the ability of some of the smaller 
groups of mappers to get an import plan through all the loops.

So I think we are at the point where ideally we expect local groups to 
come up a decision on data quality and submit individual import plans. 
All three sources, Stat Can, Microsoft and NR Can LiDAR data meet the 
licensing OpenStreetMap licensing requirements but your plan will have 
to specify which license is being used for the import and how it meets 
the OSM guidelines.

I note some imports in Africa are done by mappers who live outside 
Africa so I'm unclear if you need to live in the area to import or not 
or how far away you can be and still be counted as a local mapper.

Since in Nate's opinion the Canada wide import plan does not meet the 
guidelines please do not use it as a template.

Have fun

Cheerio John

Nate Wessel wrote on 2019-09-27 12:03 PM:
>
> John,
> You are once again purposely mischaracterizing my position on this and 
> I do not appreciate it one bit. Your import did not follow the import 
> guidelines and was not approved by the broader community. It was not 
> sent out to the mailing list, it was barely documented, it was not 
> posted on the import page on the wiki... I could go on. I was not the 
> only person who had a problem with it - I was just the first to say 
> something. The buildings imported in Toronto were very low quality IMO 
> and the changes were happening very, very quickly and without notice.
>
> But we do not need to rehash old fights.
>
> I would like to see buildings (re)imported in Toronto (the rest of 
> Canada is not really my business), but I would like to see it done 
> right. I can elaborate what I mean by that, but so can the archives of 
> this mailing list. If people are interested in engaging in a serious 
> discussion about moving forward with a building import for Toronto, I 
> am happy to engage constructively with that.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Nate Wessel, PhD
> Planner, Cartographer, Transport Nerd
> NateWessel.com <http://www.natewessel.com>
>
> On 2019-09-27 11:44 a.m., john whelan wrote:
>> From memory we have imported Ottawa's buildings under the correct 
>> license (Stat Can so the federal government's open data license) and 
>> the quality was deemed acceptable by the local mappers.
>>
>> Then we opened up a second import plan to import buildings and a fair 
>> number were imported.  This included an task manager set up with 
>> tiles to assist the mapping.
>>
>> The data sources were different as each municipality created their 
>> own source.
>>
>> My understanding is some mappers thought the data should be 
>> preprocessed and two or three were going to come up with a plan to 
>> preprocess the data.
>>
>> About that time an American mapper, Nate, who was living in Toronto 
>> took exception to 1,000,000 buildings being imported in Western 
>> Canada and requested the DWG to remove them without waiting for 
>> discussion on talk-ca to address his concerns.
>>
>> We do have three sources of correctly licensed data, the Stat Can 
>> data sets, the Microsoft data sets, and the NR Canada LiDAR data.
>>
>> I do know that a number of departments and agencies would like to use 
>> buildings and although they can use the open data sources using OSM 
>> would be more convenient.
>>
>> I'm not sure what if anything is happening at the moment.
>>
>> Are we expecting local groups to draw up their own import plan as 
>> Ottawa did since we seem to be unable to get a consensus across Canada?
>>
>> My gut feeling is with three sources of data we'll see new mappers 
>> importing in buildings without going through an import process.  Are 
>> we content to let that happen?
>>
>> Have whoever it was who was going to come up with a preprocessing 
>> plan done so?  Has it been accepted by the rest of us?
>>
>> I note that Pierre has noted there is now a validation process in 
>> JOSM for correcting buildings that are not quite 90 degrees on the 
>> corners.  Would an acceptable approach be to import then return to 
>> check the angles on the corners and correct them?
>>
>> Does Nate still have unaddressed concerns about buildings being 
>> imported in Western Canada?
>>
>> Can we get a consensus about what to do next?
>>
>> Thanks John
>> *
>> *
>> *
>> *
>>
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