Bringing building outline Open Data into OSM has taken some years. The first problem to overcome was knowledge of OpenStreetMap by various levels of government. An early contact with the City of Ottawa was made by two students aged around twelve who used OpenStreetMap to build an Open Data App for a competition. It didn't win first prize but it was the only one that could be used off-line. One is now a qualified schoolteacher by the way so you can tell how long ago it was.
The head of OC Transpo was heard to say don't worry about the license we want you to have the bus stops. So the next step was the Open Data license. Somehow or other I was invited to some sort of round table with Treasury Board about Open Data and raised the issue of license compatibility with OpenStreetMap. It took them five years of consultations etc before the license was changed to the 2.0 licence which both they and I thought was compatible. It took about another year or so to have the City of Ottawa formally adopt the new license. Stats Canada played a role in persuading the City of Ottawa to adopt the new license and to make a file of the building outlines available to OSM. Initially they weren't sure if they had one that could be made available, the file for property taxes is held by a separate agency in Ontario that is very jealous of its data. The license was questioned and eventually made its way to the OSM Legal Working Group where it was confirmed to be acceptable. Going this route can add considerable time to an import by the way so if you can use a license that has already been approved its a lot faster. For Ottawa we had the data from a single source, we had a local group of mappers who knew the area and thoroughly discussed the import over coffee for some months before deciding to do the import. We were exceptionally lucky in the skill set of the local mappers and their ability to work as a team. What was really interesting was what happened next and that was the building outlines were enriched both with the type of building and additional tags with address information, quite a few commercial buildings had websites etc added. The added tags was exactly what Stats had been after. Many of those tagging were mapping for the first time in response to a Stats Can Web page. So OSM gained some mappers. Stats had funding for the pilot until March 31st. Anything done after that needed more funding or would be done in spare time if there was any. Hence the 2020 project. The idea was that mapathons would accurately map buildings across Canada. It did generate a lot of interest from University GIS departments and schools however and a number of government departments and agencies expressed an interest in the data. A comment from Treasury Board was about 60% of the government Open Data consumed was by other government departments which surprised them. This use of Open Data consumption by other government departments is worth mentioning to governments by the way. " Yea, we had pretty good success having highschool students add in attributes for buildings using walking maps!" Unfortunately the accuracy of the buildings mapped in iD left something to be desired. So licensing is big. Stats released some building outlines under the Federal Government's 2.0 licence and that's what this import is all about. How should it be handled? Basically the problem becomes one of who are the local mappers since these are the ones who say if an import should go ahead or not. Canada is big. Ottawa was small enough that issues could be talked through face to face. We had a short discussion on talk-ca before starting the import and a suggestion was made that a single import plan was the way to go. The other complicating factor here is a lot of people are very interested in using the data one way or another. The take away, have fun if you can. Cheerio John On Sat, 26 Jan 2019 at 13:55, Javier Carranza <javier.carra...@geocensos.com> wrote: > Hi there to all, > > Really interested in this thread as we are precisely a community in > contact with National Statistics Offices (NSOs) like Stat Can and we see a > growing interest in OSM's geodatabase. > > I can tell the interest will remain in the coming years and we need to be > prepared. As NSOs are planning their censuses for 2020 (and onwards) like > in the case of Uganda: https://opendri.org/uganda-open-mapping-for-resilience/ > , the geo open data concept will prevail. > > Other insights, anyone? > > >
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