[Talk-GB] Getting Highway Agency information into OSM

Andy Robinson ajrlists at gmail.com
Tue Jul 8 10:07:22 UTC 2014


John,

 

You might clarify what HA means by "Plans". Typically major road projects
will be designed by one of the big UK or international Engineering firms
(AECOM, Atkins, Jacobs etc etc) who produce drawings of the project that are
used at various stages from planning through to construction. The HA almost
certainly have these drawings (Plans), especially those that are used at
planning and consultation stages. They may well also have them as electronic
CAD files which may or may not be loaded into some HA GIS system, I don't
know. Once a project is built the Contractor hands over as-built
data/drawings which then go into the record files of the HA, local authority
etc. The Ordnance Survey reference these for their mapping but at some point
will also re-survey (air or manual).

 

Anyway, regardless of the format the base for all these drawings and
electronic files is a mix of Ordnance Survey Mastermap data with additional
data gathered during a topographical survey by the Engineering Firm during
the planning and design process. Copyrights for data gathered by the
Engineering firm normally get transferred to the client who pays for the
work, so in theory the copyright will be a  mix of OS and HA or whoever the
ultimate client is.

 

At the end of the day, as mappers knowing when a new road is being built is
useful enough for our needs. The HA only builds a proportion of our new
infrastructure and feeds from Local Authorities are just as useful for
spotting new development (In Birmingham we follow planning application
notices to get a heads up). Knowing exactly the alignment of a new road is
less important because we can map it to the same degree of accuracy as every
other road OSM has from GPS, and eventually aerial imagery.

 

I don't see the earlier responses to this thread as a sign of negativity.
Obviously a dialogue with the HA would be very beneficial and could lead to
useful data being made available to us under terms that are acceptable.
However it is wrong to think that all the data big organisations hold is
useful to OSM, in my experience its often not, either because of licence
issues, or because of reliability and verifiability of the data itself.
Unfortunately our institutions and government bodies hold an awful lot of
poor quality data, its one of the reasons they are interested in working
with OSM. The DfT NapTAN dataset being a very good example.

 

Best of luck with the further discussions.

 

Cheers

Andy

 

From: John Baker [mailto:rovastar at hotmail.com] 
Sent: 06 July 2014 00:57
To: Rob Nickerson; Talk-GB
Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] Getting Highway Agency information into OSM

 

Rob,

To be fair when I did post that there had been a lack of interest. I asked
could we use the OS maps we currently use and nothing. 
I asked what people do currently and nothing.
You are the first to say that this could/should be ok. 

I am glad to see that someone is using this approach currently.

This is about getting a process in place so they use the correct data. They
have many types of data and we just need them to use the correct one (i.e
Opendata) so we can map with confidence. 
There was a desire to get the correct data so we can use it. He didn't
really understand and thought everything was ok (it is PD..., etc) I said I
need to check as we cannot use all different types of copyright material
some OS stuff could/should be ok. They have hundreds of different plans
hopefully it shouldn't be too much of an issue to use/create another one.

I will speak to them next week to see what I can sort out.

John

  _____  

Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2014 21:19:55 +0100
Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] Getting Highway Agency information into OSM
From: rob.j.nickerson at gmail.com
To: rovastar at hotmail.com; talk-gb at openstreetmap.org

On 5 July 2014 19:20, John Baker <rovastar at hotmail.com> wrote:

<snip>


I'll let them them know about the copyright situation (which I was fully
aware from day one was a concern) and there is no real interest from the OSM
community for establishing this.

 

John,

Please don't tell the Highways Agency that as it is *not* the case. The
blame lies with the Ordnance Survey and their reluctance to make it easy for
public sector bodies to release map data based on their products. I would
rather you highlight that to Highways Agency so that they know where the
real blame lies.

And yes, if they have maps that are based on OS OpenData (for example the OS
StreetView maps) then I would love to see them. This is how we are working
with Birmingham City Council to get maps of their proposed 20mph zones.

Perhaps step one is to find out what they have.

 

Rob

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20140708/8b1abc24/attachment.html>


More information about the Talk-GB mailing list