[Talk-GB] State of play of OS Vector data

[Robert Scott]

On Sunday 02 May 2010, Seventy 7 wrote:
> Can someone tell us what's happening with the latest release of OS data please?

People are looking at it, people are stroking their beards.

There was a bit of discussion about this at the hack day yesterday. Probably the best thing to do is convert bits of data to OSM format and allow local users to merge their own areas at will.

None of the road vector data is really suitable for conversion. It's not topologically correct - it's vectorial, but it's designed for rendering only really. The vector data has street names only for major streets so that's another point against it.

The natural features (water, woodlands) are very detailed and comprehensive and probably are worth converting at some point. However, the data isn't very clean. There are odd polygon slivers and spurs here and there. Large areas are split up into cells which don't, in OSM parlance, 'node share', so a bit of intelligent processing and automatic cleaning are needed. Fortunately, projects in other countries have had these problems before and solved them quite easily.

The buildings in the VectorMap District aren't that good. They're the equivalent of what you would see in a landranger map. Blocks of 'there are buildings here'. Nothing like the detail that StreetView has. There are people looking at automatic vectorization of the StreetView buildings, but it is unclear how well this will work.

Beyond this, there's a question of infrastructure. Suppose we did make a perfect .osm conversion of (e.g.) woodland data, how do we distribute this data to users to merge? As great big .osm files? Potlatch 2 is introducing the idea of 'data layers' - layers of data from different servers that can be merged from. So it's a promising idea to provide converted data from alternate osm-style servers and display them as layers in pl2. And if someone writes this functionality into JOSM, that too.


robert.