Is there a case for examining the quality of the existing OSM boundary data and trying to improve it?
Is it worth/possible to create a project to do this, either within the current OSM framework or without? I'm thinking about something similar to www.mappa-mercia.org, which popped up on twitter this morning, but with the focus more on a particular dataset rather than a locale. There are a few possible data sources which might help improve the data, legitimately! 1. I wonder if the euro-election constituency boundaries might be available without any restrictive licences? It might be that the EU would have rights to such data which would override any OS imposed licencing issues. 2. There are lots of physical features from which boundaries are derived - rivers, roads, etc. Surely if these were mapped as geo-features the data could be copied to a boundary layer where it was known that the boundary followed the feature, rather than the other way round. 3. There are lots of "Welcome to Surrey" type signposts around. Mapping their locations would start to give us some join-the-dots style boundaries. 4. Lastly, if I drew some crude "from-memory" style boundaries at a very low zoom level, they could be amended and improved whenever anyone noticed they were wrong. Would that breach anyone's licencing? Just a thought. Feargal OSM does have some administrative boundaries but they are one of the harder things to derive. Some county boundaries can be obtained from old out-of-copyright maps, but these can and do change over time so it's not an infallable method. Borough boundaries have been derived, by some people, in urban areas from on-the-ground inspection of street furniture (street lights, rubbish bins, manhole covers, whatever) and then extrapolating from there. Ward boundaries are very difficult, I don't know of any general method for capturing these. So, OSM does contain some boundary data, but its not very complete and may not be very accurate.
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