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

[john whelan]

Statistics Canada has been releasing municipal data under the federal
government open data licence.  It did a pilot in Ottawa to import buildings
etc which was successful.  It then hoped to extend the pilot to the rest of
the country.

Much of the provincial government's and municipal government's open data is
under a different licence which might not have been approved by the LWG.

The City of Ottawa's Open Data licence does align with OSM and if you
examine Ottawa I think you'll find most buildings are correctly numbered
etc.

Some years ago I seem to recall someone reporting 500,000 buildings to the
DWG on the grounds they had been imported too quickly as part of the Stats
Canada initiative.

This sort of took the wind out of the sails.  One mapper involved decided
other hobbies were more suited to his life style.  I'm not sure what has
been happening more recently.

Cheerio John

On Tue, Jul 4, 2023, 17:17 Stephen Bosch <posting at vodacomm.ca> 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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