[OSM-talk] Canada road data available?

[Jason Reid]

Steve Chilton wrote:
> Would someone care to investigate this note that appears on the Ogle
> Earth blog today:
> --------------------------------
> Canada roads, for free: Peter Rukavina notes that Canada's National Road
> Network is now available as free download as KML, ESRI Shapefile, and
> GML. Peter adds:
> For anyone interested in GIS, map-hacking and similar pursuits, the NRN
> is an amazing dataset. That it's made freely available for any use is a
> dramatic departure from usual practice with government data in Canada,
> where we usually have to pay for data that is, by all rights, already
> "ours."
> --------------------------------
> Original link at :
> http://www.ogleearth.com/index.html
>
>   
We've done some investigating this data, I personally spoke with a few 
people from Natural Resources Canada (one of the main departments behind 
the Geobase project) at the FOSS4G conference in late September. We are 
pretty sure that the license is compatible (its an attribution style 
license and everyone I've spoken with that had knowledge of the data 
felt that it shouldn't be a problem). I had left contact information for 
some higher up people with Geobase with Corey Burger after the 
conference and he was going to contact them at some point to confirm 
that the license is compatible.

We've started the initial prep work in the mean time, and there is a 
draft version of the converter tool that will turn the GML they provide 
into OSM completed, its available in the SVN if anyone wants to take a 
look. Size-wise we're looking at probably another good 5gb+ of raw OSM 
data between the roads, there are well over a million kilometers in the 
base NRN dataset.

There is one huge issue thats still outstanding however, pretty much 
while the road network data is there, its only the roads. There are no 
names for anything below a primary highway for most of the country at 
this point (although it is supposedly being worked on). They have just 
recently released the data for one of the smallest provinces with names, 
and did a major update of the road network data for one of the larger 
provinces. Some of these missing fields we may be able to source from 
elsewhere, as the data that is being contributed to Geobase is coming 
from the provincial and municipal governments and some of them have 
released some data under various licenses. Fortunately the Geobase group 
are assigning each entity in the data unique ID's, so worst case if we 
decided to forge ahead with the import of the name-less data to start we 
can fairly easily merge in the other fields as they are released.

-Jason Reid