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

[Stephen Bosch]

Hi Justin, thanks for this.

Maybe the best thing for me to do is to try to do an import of one 
(gotta start small) of these problematic neighbourhoods in Calgary, 
perhaps with the help of your tool, just to learn what's involved (I've 
never contributed to OSM before).

Stephen

Am 04.07.23 um 23:40 schrieb 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Talk-ca mailing list
>> Talk-ca at openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca

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