[OSM-talk] What about waterways?

Thu May 31 20:28:55 BST 2007

Hoi everybody :)

I need help and advice. The situation is the following:

1) I am a member of a club interested in inland navigation (DBA, mostly we deal with vintage dutch barges, but that's not a strict requirement, basically we are in an "anything goes" situation).

2) As a club we are one of the biggest in Europe (at least among the English ones, possibly also one of the most noisy in defending free inland navigation, museum boats + people living aboard)

3) We have been unofficially contacted by a govt agency in order to help defining the criteria for an european portal related to inland navigation.

This portal will publish normative stuff, timetables, lock-gate related material, drafts, etc.

This is where I got in the story at personal level. I run a Drupal based site called http://bargewiki.i-iter.org/ that is slowly beginning to assemble a "map" of the inland waters and because of this I was asked to prepare the actual tech requests. 

I based my superficial analysis on some small foundations:

1) the minimal "unit" we need at DB level is a "waterway section" (some waterways are administered by different entities, some of them even overlap each other). The idea is that by assembling "sections" we can make "administrative domains", waterways, standing match routes or whatever else.

2) Sections come in 2 flavors (linear and square). Canals and rivers are mostly linear, lakes and see branches are made in checkerboards.

3) Density may always be augmented. We can start from a uniform density and locally grow in a telescopic way (100 linear meters of an Amsterdam canal are going to contain more normative information than 10 sq. miles in IJsselmeer).

4) We want a wiki-like model. That is, a single shared public database in which any number of users can add data, objects, events, etc.

5) Since this information is relevant for the lives of the boaters (and their money, since sadly prices for barges are damn high) we want the source to be always clearly identifiable. 

6) Single user should have the possibility to decide what sort of information they "trust". Clubs should be able to offer "ready-made trustable selections", etc.

7) Information published on the portal should be self-distributing with no human intervention via RSS/ATOM

8) A WAP based access should be granted, as even a dinghy has a mobile phone, nowadays

We are beginning the phase in which our wiki will start to collect GPS identified data (lock, bridges, notable points, etc). One obvious solution seemed to me that we can use the META Geourl tags to identify them. Would this be enough to deliver them to an OpenGIS system? If not, what should we do? I believe this is NOT enough, because it does not even say what the thing is.

We are interested in starting openGIS experiments at any moment. As you probably know, the Belgium-France-Mediterranean directory is frequently used by boaters to access the Mediterranean from the North Sea (and back) without taking the fuss to meet the ocean in the Biscaille Gulf area, so having a public free map system would be a knock-out. We are also in contact with other groups who mostly do sea navigation, mainly based in the Mediterranean and Baltic area, so there can be a propagation effect. We would really like to enter into some established form of co-operation with the open-GIS development.

Moreover, there is an important detail, although faraway in the future: many boats have on board instruments that permanently collect data about depth, current, etc. They are permanently interfaced to computers, so it's no big deal to write a procedure that will store data coupled with time and GPS coordinates. While these data are evidently going to be mixed in precision (different sensors, bad response for depth sounders in shallow) we still can request our members to record them and later upload them. 

Data will also (obviously) available to third parties that make a commercial use of it, since it's going to be licensed on CC-attribution, and maybe this will help chart vendors in staying out of our road, as they can pretty much benefit from what we publish. 

By all means, it looks like what we need is simply "join openstreets". Yet after a quick exploration I have a few open questions: I see there is a key for "waterway" (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Key:waterway ) and in fact waterways are there. Yet, I cannot seem to find a way to mark notable points on it lock-gates, bridges, etc. These points are important for navigation, and they should somehow include relevant data, like air-draft, draft, timetables, etc. Is it me being stupid (that's highly probable :) ) or it really means I'm asking to modify the software?

Thanks :)

Berto 'd Sera

Skype: berto.d.sera

Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20070531/3cba3665/attachment.html>