[Talk-ca] State of OSM maps in Calgary - comparison with Germany

[Stephen Bosch]

Hi everybody, bonjour -

I live in Germany and I use OSM on a daily basis for address look-ups 
and navigation. I've got the OSM+ app on my phone and it works very 
well. In fact, the OSM maps are often better than Google Maps.

When I'm back in Canada (Calgary, mostly), it is practically unusable. 
The most obvious weakness is that buildings are often unnumbered or 
missing entirely, so simple address look-ups fail. For a dramatic 
example of this, have a look at the Capitol Hill neighbourhood in Calgary:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/106980291#map=17/51.07172/-114.10028

While it's true that there is a large community of contributors in 
Germany, the main reason the OSM maps are so good there is that states 
and municipalities share rich geodata freely, with some even actively 
contributing to OSM. Many public services rely on OSM data, so it's in 
their interest that it be of high quality.

The City of Calgary seems to have an open data policy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m32hxV8md4c

https://www.calgary.ca/service-lines/2023-2026-city-services/data-analytics-information-access.html

https://data.calgary.ca/

so I would expect the same to apply there. For example, there is a 2D 
buildings map for Calgary that seems to be complete:

https://data.calgary.ca/Base-Maps/2D-Buildings-Map/h98y-bpv6

Here's a 3D LIDAR-derived map:

https://mapgallery.calgary.ca/apps/bcd22e7089a440e792628ac61f35f4c1/explore

In short, the public data appear to be available. Why aren't they in 
OSM? Is this a licence problem?

Kind regards

Stephen Bosch
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