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

[Justin Tracey]

It's a combination of licensing issues and the difficulty of getting 
consensus for imports.

The former is a problem of each source of data (municipality, city, 
province, quango) typically deciding their lawyers have to make minor 
tweaks to the wording, which means it's no longer the same license as 
any of the approved ones, so must go through the whole LWG approval 
process again. The easiest way to work around this in most cases is 
getting explicit written consent from the source for use with OSM. See:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Getting_permission

The latter is a problem of buy-in from the community. Large-scale 
building imports have been discussed numerous times, with varying 
degrees of success (e.g., Toronto's building import seems to be 
complete). The most recent of these discussions is, I believe, this one, 
which has been silent for a few years now:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canada_-_The_Open_Database_of_Buildings

Since then, there has been an address data export from the government of 
Canada under an approved license, but I don't believe anyone has 
proposed a full data import. The closest I know of is this tool I made 
to use the data as a source, not as an automated import (it's currently 
targeted at Waterloo Region, but I designed it to be easy to reuse 
anywhere covered in the StatCan data):
https://github.com/jtracey/WaterlooRegionAddresses

  - Justin

On 2023-07-04 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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