He fet uns petits canvis i alguna correcció ortogràfica i d'estil.
Salut!
1. Who are you and what do you do? What got you into OpenStreetMap?
We are the OpenStreetMap's Catalan speaking community. We found a common
goal that mixed geospatial information and the promotion of the Catalan
language (an Occitano-Romance language spoken by more than 11 million
people community across several states). OSM is the answer to our goal.
It provides an open data base which allows us to add local information
and in Catalan, freely.
The Google effort to translate into Spanish all the street and way names
written in Catalan (both legal names and used names), ended in a huge
mess and a sum of protests that continue nowadays when somebody tries to
find a certain location. This fact helped to promote and be seen as an
open alternative, OpenStreetMap.
2. What would you say is the current state of OSM and the OSM community
in Catalunya?
Nowadays, the way data have good quality thanks to the hard work made in
the past. There's also good data sets involving paths and mountain
hiking routes. The map is currently growing and with a high level of
detail in some areas. But there's a lot of work to do in the urban areas.
We had the pleasure to be part of the SotM 2010 which took place in
Girona five years ago. Last year, we organized our first meeting as a
OSM community in Sarrià de Ter. Since this first meeting, we started to
build and shape our community. We organized several workshops and
conferences like “OpenStreetMap for the Forest Defence Association”. A
workshop which focused on tagging forest elements, like tracks and fire
hydrants and the use of mobile applications.
We have a long path to increase our mappers count and improve
communication between us.
3. What are the unique challenges and pleasures of OpenStreetMap in
Catalunya? What aspects of the projects should the rest of the world be
aware of?
We focused our work in some specific areas like Montujïc's cemetery, the
Barcelona's Zoo or Port Aventura amusement park. We are working with
Wikipedia community to link OSM data with Wikidata and viceversa. We
finished in 2 weeks of restless work the addition of the wikidata tag to
all the cities, towns, provinces and regions of Catalunya.
We also started to recover the Catalan names in Perpinyà (Northern
Catalonia, southern France). There is also pending work tagging Occitan
names in Val d'Aran. We are glad to count with apps like OsmAnd that
allow the usage of Catalan language but we miss yet a TTS in Catalan.
Some mappers of our OSM community started to focus on 3D tagging and
urban elements as bus routes, fire hydrants or opening hours. The
knowledge and the focus on local areas let us improve the data and
introduce OSM as a rich and reliable source of data.
One of our goals is to involve governments and show them the benefits of
open data. We are currently importing information from the cadastre in
some areas like Girona, a work started and coordinated by the Spanish
OSM community. A task that would be easier with the implication of the
Spanish government. We also hope that the information from the ICGC
(Catalonia's Cartographic and Geological Institute) will be added into
OSM in a near future thanks to a new transparency law.
4. What steps could the global OpenStreetMap community take to help
support OSM in the Catalunya specifically?
OSM helped us by letting create a non-state community. Maybe, we expect
to increase the strength of the communication and feedback with the rest
of the OSM communities.
5. Last year OSM celebrated its 10th birthday, where do you think the
project will be in 10 years time, both globally and Catalunya?
In 10 years time, the detail of information will be awesome. We hope
there will be an increase of mappers and interest in open data in our
influence area. We will be experimenting a process similar as Wikipedia.
It will become, hopefully, an essential resource that with better
information will compete with commercial alternatives.
We hope more governments and administrations will discontinue the use of
commercial maps and payment data, increasing support to open data
initiatives. Some of our city councils start to join OSM by using their
maps or by opening their data bases to OSM mappers. A fact that will
continue growing because open data is also a way to optimize and save
money and resources and to promote the creation of companies linked to
the use of open data.
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