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

[James]

Ottawa has imported addresses and buildings:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ottawa/Import/Plan

On Tue, Jul 4, 2023, 5:46 PM Justin Tracey <j3tracey at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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