Hi Alessandro,
This is great news. Thanks for sharing. Getting a subset of the
municipalities' data into a repository with a common license will be
be a huge step forward. Once you have some data in the repository,
then the broader OSM community can look at how to import the data into
OSM. Then as more municipality's data gets into the repository, then
OSM import work can expand.
So my suggestion to you is thus: work to get a *subset* of the data
assembled under the license first. Then expand coverage second. This
enables planning for imports to start sooner and would engage the
broader OSM community. I believe the work the broader community is
doing now is mostly focused on tracing building footprints based on
satellite images.
Personally, I believe that the Federal Government should play a role
in consolidating municipal open data. It's much easier to make the
data *usable* by having one way (or small number of ways) of
representing things across the country than to have 100s of different
Municipalities doing things in their own way and left as an exercise
for the user to sort that all out.
On 2018-02-07 09:42 AM, Alasia, Alessandro (STATCAN) wrote:
Dear all,
It is fantastic to see all these exchanges about BC2020i! There are
a lot of great ideas and improvements being made. I cannot follow up
on each point, though I wanted to update you regarding one area of
specific relevance: the attempt to find a solution to the licensing
issue for building related datasets. I believe this is one area
where my team can contribute to support the BC2020i.
With my team, I am looking into the feasibility of compiling all
available municipal open data files into one single file and then
releasing this single file under one common license, specifically
the open data licence of the Canadian federal government. This
would, hopefully, solve the license compatibility issue. We are
still exploring this possibility but are moderately optimistic.
So far we started with the "easy" task: compiling all the known
files – a special thanks to those who contributed to the tables on
the BC2020i wiki page! With that and other OD sources, we compiled
an "OpenAddressRepository" file of nearly 11 million records
(georeferenced) and an "OpenBuildingRepository" file of nearly 3.2
million polygons (still in progress). Preliminary analysis suggests
that the coverage and geocoding are very promising. More
importantly, given that the files all originate from official
municipal sources, there should be no reason to doubt the quality of
the data.
The next step, for us, is to look at the process required to release
these files with a GoC open data license. We do not yet have a clear
timeline for release, but if this idea is possible, we should almost
certainly make it before the timelines that were discussed on
Talk-ca for vetting each and all individual municipal open data
licenses - 2080s or 2030s if I recall correctly :-)
We believe this solution/approach, if successful, puts an end to the
issue of license compatibility (at least for the files found thus
far) and greatly facilitates the use of these open data by the
general public as well as the private and public sector.
Furthermore, and more importantly for BC2020i, this solution paves
the way for the many local OSM groups to import these open data as
they see fit. As well, once the large national level files are
released, we might be able to collaborate with local groups and
provide more manageable partitions of the larger files.
Of course, this approach will not necessarily solve the license
compatibility issue for all types of municipal files. Thus, needless
to say, anybody is obviously free to pursue submitting individual
municipal OD licenses to the License Working Group of OSM. Though,
given that the Working Group resources are scarce, and assuming the
approach outlined above works for building footprints, we would be
happy to discuss the feasibility of compiling and re-releasing other
municipal open data under the open data licence of the Canadian
federal government.
Finally, as I mentioned in other communications, my team is also
exploring other activities that will hopefully contribute to the
BC2020i. These activities touch on data analysis, data monitoring,
and building footprint extraction from satellite imagery. For this
work, we are primarily using open source tools and applications that
can be integrated in open source environments (more updates on all
of this hopefully soon!).
More updates, feedback, and follow up on other interesting points of
discussion later on.
Regards to all,
Alessandro and DEIL team
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