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

[Jarek Piórkowski]

It is a license problem. OSM legal working group wants to validate each license separately. Canadian open data licenses are generally named "Open Government License - <government body>" and according to OSM, each <government body> is a separate license that need to be separately approved. As you might imagine this is very effort-intensive and thus hasn't been done.

More recently, some or much of the municipal and provincial data has been collated by the federal government and reissued under the federal license which I believe is already approved. However, I don't know if this includes Calgary address data, and no one has done the legwork of organizing an import yet. You could be the hero OSM needs :)

Cheers,
Jarek

On Tue, Jul 4, 2023, at 17:13, Stephen Bosch wrote:
> 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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