[Talk-GB] Using Open Street map for UK local government physical assets

[Tom Chance]

Mike,

What you describe is technically feasible, would potentially be fine with
the OpenStreetMap community, and would in my view be a really excellent
initiative. There are probably three issues:

1. The load you'd put on servers. If this is an application used by
relatively few local government officers, and you have few resources, you
might get away with just using the OpenStreetMap servers including the tile
server for the maps, and something like the Overpass API to overlay custom
sets of features (see http://overpass-api.de and http://overpass-turbo.eu).
However, you might want to consider setting up your own server and keeping
an up-to-date copy of the OpenStreetMap data so you can guarantee uptime
and avoid overloading community systems.

2. Training local government officers to enter data into OpenStreetMap.
Will this just be GIS officers, or others? It wouldn't be great if large
numbers of inexperienced people came along and started making lots of edits
without understanding some fundamentals about OpenStreetMap, even with a
simple dialogue. It could overwhelm local users who are often quite happy
to offer some advice. Worse, it could lead to lots of copyrighted material
flooding in. Then again your dialogue, and the volume, might make this a
non-issue.

3. Getting existing data into OpenStreetMap. I imagine a large proportion
of the assets you are talking about aren't in OpenStreetMap yet, so they'd
need to be added. We really don't like people bulk-importing data, it
causes all sorts of problems. We are also incredibly cautious about
licensing, and usually copying over local authority data brings with it
complicated issues about Ordnance Survey rights. So you'd need to get clear
legal advice on that to satisy us, and then carefully work with the
community to bring in the data you have, merging it with existing
OpenStreetMap data. See this page for some further info:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import_guidelines

Others may be able to offer more hands-on help. There are companies you
could speak to, like:
http://www.opencagedata.com/
http://www.geofabrik.de/
http://www.itoworld.com/ (for transport-related work)

There are also others on this list with much more technical talent who
could advise, and some councils already using OSM extensively, such as
James Rutter at Surrey Heath council (@Chobhamonian on twitter).

Regards,
Tom


On 6 February 2014 14:13, Mike Thacker <mike.thacker at esd.org.uk> wrote:

> Hello
>
> I am working with tools used by a large number of UK councils, rather than
> us maintain separate data on local government assets (libraries, public
> toilets, contact centres, etc), we should like to hook in to Open Street
> Map to use its data and help maintain it.
>
> So I'd like to do two things:
>
>    1. Overlay on the Open Street Maps we already use (see the rather
>    small example within this report <http://reports.esd.org.uk/Reports/14> we
>    generate) assets of types selected by users.  We can either do this by
>    switching on the relevant OSM layers or by downloading the data and
>    overlaying it on a map.  Note that maps are usually for a single local
>    or fire authority.
>    2. Provide an interface whereby local authority officers can update
>    existing assets and add new ones to directly to Open Street Map via a
>    simple dialogue that we provide.  We can introduce some validation on who
>    does this.
>
> I'd like to explore the feasibility of doing 1 and 2 above and whether we
> are safe doing 2 without any suggestion that we might impair the quality of
> OSM data.
>
> I'd really appreciate any feedback by email or ideas as to whom I should
> contact and how.
>
> Thanks in advance
> Mike
>
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>


-- 
http://tom.acrewoods.net   http://twitter.com/tom_chance
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