[Talk-ca] Importing buildings in Canada

[Jarek Piórkowski]

On Fri, 27 Sep 2019 at 11:45, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Then you can encourage these agencies to urge Statcan to improve the
quality of their data.

If we expect some volunteers to come up with a building squaring
algorithm and implementation, surely an agency whose whole job is
collecting and massaging data can do better.

> I'm not sure what if anything is happening at the moment.

Nothing.

> 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?

It seems basically impossible to prevent this, and given the number of
active editors in Canada who care about this, would be difficult to
even detect this. That would make the question of whether we're
content about it moot.

That's the effect of strict import guidelines here - those who would
like to keep to them usually give up, and those who don't care (or
don't know) go ahead anyway. (See, for example, trees in London, Ont.)
That works in Germany which has 3 nitpicking OSM editors per square
kilometer to notice, less so in Canada.

> Have whoever it was who was going to come up with a preprocessing plan done so?

There's been work towards this but my understanding is that it's far
from complete and stalled.

> Can we get a consensus about what to do next?

I don't believe so. Sorry - you asked.

Thanks,
--Jarek