[Talk-us] Any mappers local to NYC/LI?

[Skye Book]

On Nov 16, 2011, at 1:07 PM, Katie Filbert wrote:

> 
> On Nov 16, 2011, at 12:18 PM, Skye Book <skye.book at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I'm doing a ton of work with the data made available from the city as of late and a gripe from some people employed by the local government about OSM is that it isn't making full use of the data that the city is putting out there for consumption.
> 
> The terms of use are not quite right I think.
> 
> Data like building footprints would sure be nice though I'd be cautious about dumping data in that the community could do a good job of collecting and maintaining.
> 
> The community-- that's the other issue and think it would be important to get the local mappers group going more with mapping parties. I did one with Wikimedia NYC folks and maybe we/they could do another but it will take more than that. There also is an OSM NYC meetup.com group which could be reactivated

Yes I found a few resources to this end.  The 2010 mapping party page on the OSM site + the meetup group made me wonder what kind of response I'd get from the list.

Getting the meetup group back together would be great, and something ongoing would be really great :)

WRT building data imports, that's a lot of data for the community to gather when [license permitting] they can be getting the more esoteric features that the city might not be keeping track of with much veracity, lending credence to Bryce's point below about OSM being a tool for alerting agencies rather than just a dumping ground.

> 
> Cheers,
> Katie



On Nov 16, 2011, at 12:43 PM, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:

> On 11/16/2011 09:18 AM, Skye Book wrote:
>> 
>> I'm doing a ton of work with the data made available from the city as of late and a gripe from some people employed by the local government about OSM is that it isn't making full use of the data that the city is putting out there for consumption.  Indeed, there is a ton of information that we can bringing into the dataset (streetlights, building outlines for the five boroughs, etc).
>> 
>> Anyone is interested in ganging up on this, or discussing the NYC data situation with researchers as well as GIS analysts would be most welcome.  Any takers?
> I wanted to import NYC water fountain locations, but determined the license terms were completely inappropriate.  It was a non-starter.
> 
> I'm also leery of one-way imports, as the data starts to diverge.  I think the real power exists when crowdsourced corrections have a chance of at least alerting the official agencies about bad data.  Osm as a conversation, rather than osm as a dumping ground, makes sense.

100% agree. A basic starting point, at the very least would be essential.  On all of the Bytes of the Big Apple download pages there are error report forms so there's some hope that those get reviewed and the appropriate changes inserted.

I also must say that between the Esri DevMeetup on Monday and the GIS day activities today the general attitude in the agencies does seem to land well on the side of public dissemination of information.  I've had some extremely productive conversations on the side of these events where folks were happy to point me towards sets that I didn't even know existed.

In the same vein as the licensing issues, Socrata doesn't make the raw backing data readily available through their web interface (it takes a bit of digging through the page sources) and their tweeted response to my asking about getting to that data was "publishers can also attach shapefiles for download. If they haven't let me know, and I'll contact them."  This may be a hint that they've hit a similar wall, but it doesn't sound like they make it a process of poking these agencies for the info if it isn't attached when the sets are published.

> 
>                                                 -Bryce
> 
> 
> PS: Check out "osmsync" for a tool working in this direction.  Osmsync is particularly good for the rare situation where you have a frequently updated authoritative data source.  For example car sharing locations: there are lots of them, and they change frequently.  I use osmsync to reconcile what is in osm with the car sharing reservation data.
> 
> Each osm record is tagged with "source" and "source:pkey", so that osm changes can be tracked back their original official record.
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

____________
Skye Book
(516) 308-2616

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20111116/a1657916/attachment-0001.html>