There was an earlier discussion on talk-ca about how to handle this project.
It is similar to CANVEC in the original data sources are municipal data CANVEC uses a few other sources as well and it is released under exactly the same license but by a different federal government department. There are 3,700 municipalities in Canada. How do you deal with that? A suggestion was made on talk-ca we have one import plan that way it would at least be consistent and that's what we did. Mentally I'd split the project into getting an import plan that met all the requirements and the actual importing. To me the importing would be done by local mappers or mappers with a local connection after a local discussion which is what happened in Kingston. For locations that did not have such mappers then over time they could be tackled at a distance. One comment I recall was this was more of a marathon and to be honest we expected it to take place over a fair length of time. A lot of buildings have gone in much faster than I expected. For the pilot project with Ottawa the local Ottawa mappers were heavily involved. We learnt a fair bit on the way and that's why we basically cloned the Ottawa import plan. We noticed a lot of additional tags being added to the building=yes and that to be was a good thing in that it drew more people into OSM. I'm much more interested in those additional tags than anything else. As far as I am aware there is no list of local OSM communities in Canada and to be honest many mappers simply map and do not gather once a month at OSM meetings. I don't think we do an import plan every time we bring something across from CANVEC. Unfortunately there really is a demand for this sort of information. The initial 2020 meeting that took place at Stats Canada during the HOT summit in Ottawa had many people from government departments who were very interested in the data and especially what I call enriched data, ie buildings with addresses and other tags. Smaller school boards have expressed an interest in routing school buses using this sort of data. There is an app for the blind that guides you to the building but the building and address have to be on the map. Should we care what end users are interested in? I think that is a separate discussion. There always has been a range of views within OpenStreetMap. I have certainly been taken to task for changing a tag from traffic_lights to traffic_signals. "I mapped it and I tagged it traffic_lights and it should remain that way." Toronto was almost certainly going to be troublesome. I recall someone saying once if you gather five book classifiers together they will find six ways to classify a book. The Ottawa community is reasonably small and many meet up from time to time. In a city such as Toronto my expectation would be a much wider range of opinions. This makes it very difficult to identify if something is approved or not. It also means that my expectation that the importing mapper will use a bit of common sense and we shouldn't need to spell out things like "replace geometry tool" other mappers will have other expectations. My understanding of importing or drawing a building outline from imagery is it gets tagged building=yes and you can do no better from imagery. Occasionally you might see a building in a residential area that has two drives, I might just tag that semi. Then we throw in the 2020 project. Stats initial idea was to simply have every building mapped in Canada with iD and mapathons were a wonderful idea. Technically it is possible to accurately map a building from imagery with iD I've seen it done. You may wish to talk to Pierre about data quality from those mapathons. I had talked to Stats about getting the building outlines released under a suitable license. It only took a year to persuade the City of Ottawa to change their Open Data license to one that worked with OpenStreetMap. Stats came back some time later by releasing some building outline data under the federal government Open Data license and that's where this bit started. The 2020 project has a lot of interest from GIS departments, High Schools are thinking of how to get involved with their students. Adding tags is a lot safer and less error prone than drawing buildings in iD. Education is one area that Stats gets brownie points for so they like to promote it. Microsoft has been running the same algorithms on Canada as it has in the US. We can expect their building outlines to be released shortly. Data quality, by the time its been converted from one format to another and comes form a variety of systems some municipal data will be better than others. The data I've looked at looks reasonable however my expectations and your expectations maybe different. You might like to add a step or two into the wiki. We could do a table in the wiki with a list of communities that feel comfortable with the import. That might be troublesome, two high school students meet over coffee,"hey this is a great idea." they have osm memberships and mark the community as having approved. Has the local community approved or not? My feeling is there is a lot of support for the project, how do we tap into that support and move forward? Thoughts? Thanks John
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