[OSM-talk-nl] status of (governement) street data in NL

[Zoran Kovacevic]

I called GVI (http://www.gvi.amsterdam.nl/) after Ante/. They map almost 
everything there is to map in Amsterdam very accurately and regularly. 
Parts of their data is bought (?) from electricity & water companies, 
which makes it hard to 'give away'. They told me that GBKN 
(http://www.gbkn.nl/) takes care of the whole of NL, except for 
Amsterdam and some other cities that prefer to do it by themselves.

So I talked to GBKN. We had in interesting talk (did you know that 
different parts of Dutch government - until very recently - sent bills 
to each other for the use of their geo-data?). He told me that 
Rijkswaterstaat (a.k.a. RWS: department responsible for roads/bridges in 
NL) has a database called Nationale Wegenbestand (NWB). They are 
planning on opening this database (initially interdepartmental, but he 
also mentioned general public). There were some obvious objections to 
this plan by TeleAtlas and the likes, but since RWS is the sole owner of 
the data, it should be possible.

Good news: the NWB database consists of each and every street in the 
Netherlands!

I am now trying to circumvent the servicedesk of the subdepartment 
RWS-AGI (http://www.rws.nl/rws/agi/home/) in order to plea for dumping 
the NWB data in OSM :) I'll get a call back either today or Monday. I'll 
keep you posted on any progress.

Just suppose that this works out ... and what it will mean for OSM 
server load ;)

Z.