[Talk-us] Tampa/Clearwater Building Import to aid in Irma Recovery Efforts

Thu Sep 7 20:55:11 UTC 2017

Seems to be a lot of concerns for an import that is meant to bolster data
available prior to a major hurricane strike, when HOT does a task in Africa
I often don't see the same level of concern about the armchair mapper's
local knowledge.  That's just my observation, and I have worked some tasks
for HOT, and I have also done editing for places in the Middle East in
relation to a project I was doing for a customer and I have never come
close to stepping foot in any of those countries.  I know there are many in
the global community that have aversions to imports but if the process can
be held to a great standard, and in the face of a natural disaster, I think
we can put aside our own biases on how the map is made better.

As to the Texas statements, I have lived in Texas my whole life and have
worked for several local/state governments/parties.  There is a strong
backlash within some communities about sharing anything that cannot have
cost recuperated.  It is a stance that is slowly changing due to the strong
push from communities such as OSM, but it hasn't reached the level of other
states or countries.  Part of the problem is that there isn't a central
authority in charge of data.  You have council of governments that produce
data, counties that produce data, the state that produces data, state
agencies that produce data, and local governments that produce data.  Much
of the data could be said to be duplicated efforts but there hasn't been a
strong push from the legislature or the governor to have anything close to
a centralized data portal.  You can add to that problem the inability for
many counties and towns to afford GIS (something I'm hoping to help with as
part of my business) or GIS professionals to make data, let alone to
purchase data when it is offered.  The other issue is licensing.  I live in
North Texas and when the different communities up here get together to fly
aerials and derive planimetrics the operation is carried out by the North
Central Texas Council of Governments, which hires a company to do the
work.  When the work is done the cities that signed up for the project pay
the COG for the data and the COG pays the contractor.  In this process the
data is licensed so that only those who pay for it can use it.  That means
that many of the building footprint data sets are prevented from being
listed as open data because of the license involved.  With TNRIS releasing
LiDAR data openly hopefully some of this will change but for now it is what
it is.

That's my two cents worth on this, I think getting the data in is
important, especially as many of the government entities and news
organizations are using OSM data backed maps for base maps in the disaster
management process.  For example NOAA used a MapBox basemap for their post
Harvey aerial map (https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/harvey/index.html) I
think it would be important with the high visibility the map is getting in
the US to make sure that it accurately reflects reality on the ground.

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 3:17 PM, Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us>
wrote:

> Frederik - I'll attempt to answer your questions below. This is part of
> the effort to help in recovery efforts for hurricane Harvey and Irma.  My
> tasks are using the Microsoft provided building footprints to hard hit
> areas. There are two separate, but with common individuals involved. The US
> community is working on tasks in the US while HOT OSM is working on the
> Caribbean Island recovery efforts.
>
> On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 12:50 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> could you share some thoughts about your general process with these
>> imports? I notice that you seem to be working on a lot of them. - Have
>> you forgotten to raise Tampa/Clearwater on imports@ or was the Corpus
>> Christi one assumed to be a kind of template for all Microsoft building
>> footprint imports?
>>
>
> I wanted to get the word out to the US community first. By now I expected
> to have it posted to the import list, but i'm having problems with my cloud
> storage.
>
>>
>> I'm unclear about the status. Your posting simply says "the wiki page
>> for the import is available". What does that mean? The wiki page for
>> Corpus Christi says "Pending acceptance", the "stats" tab on
>> http://tasks.openstreetmap.us/project/118 says "0% complete" yet the
>> "activity" tab says "Glassman marked #233 as done about 6 hours ago".
>> Was that a test edit, or is the import already started?
>>
>
> Task 233 was just a small test. ( and I forgot to use my import account)
>  This task has relatively low priority since the major flooding was in
> areas east of Corpus Christi. The 0% is just a rounding error. One of a few
> thousand tasks have been completed.  I've updated the wiki page to remove
> the pending acceptance.
>
>>
>> Do you have plans to prepare further regions for imports? Since you're
>> not local to the areas in question (would it be fair to say you're on
>> the other end of the country?), do you undertake any efforts to enlist
>> local mappers besides posting on talk-us?
>>
>
> Yes we want local mappers involved. To your point, yes i'm far removed
> from Florida. But I've been fortunate to have spend quite abit of time in
> the state. Not only my travels for business but close relatives living
> throughout the state. I even used to host a conference just outside of
> Clearwater.
>
>>
>> Do you have any statistics about who the participants in these imports
>> are? As you know, the reason we're doing these "community imports" is
>> that we hope to bring local knowledge to the table; do wo know if this
>> works, or is it the same people (potentially from the other end of the
>> country) that perform the majority of import tasks on each?
>>
>
> I can't answer that question unfortunately. Some of the mappers I know to
> be very experienced and others less so. Where they are located and what
> local knowledge they have is not information that I have access to. We have
> a number of people volunteering to help with these tasks. Building imports
> are lower priority task. Getting roads updated and working in hard hit
> areas are high on our priority list. Texas is an interesting state - not
> much open data and a government that likes to cut corners in my opinion.
> What government data is available to help recovery teams is an unknown. We
> have put out a call for locals to help with specific tasks, but I'm not
> actively involved with those efforts.
>
>>
>> I'd also be interested in how long it takes for these imports to
>> complete; obviously if we should notice that people add 10k buildings in
>> an hour we must assume that the necessary diligence was not applied. --
>> I know that when HOT apply their tasking manager they often have a step
>> where a second person verifies the data added (or maybe just spot-checks
>> it). Is that a feature that the imports you run also have? The wiki page
>> for Corpus Christy says "QA: Validation: Use of validation tools in the
>> Tasking Manager process", but I assume that just refers to usual
>> automatic checks done by JOSM, not a second person inspecting the result?
>>
>
> The US Tasking Manager is the same version 2 of HOT's Tasking Manager
> which includes a second person's validation step. It's one of the great
> features of TM.  If you look at the tasks that are near completion, you can
> see that work is being validated.
>
>
>
> --
> @osm_seattle
> osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
> OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
>
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