>When Simon says "Canvec and broken import is essentially a synonym" that is not an exaggeration, if you mention Canvec in a typical European community meeting you usually just get a big sigh in return.
I think you have to understand a bit more about CANVEC data what it is and how the quality varies. Some of it is high quality data, the same source as the local fire department uses. In general CANVEC data is a collection of different data sources from each province. Each province has slightly different standards of data collection. The roads in major cites are fairly accurate both in street name and location. Address information is available for some provinces in some areas. The equipment used to collect the data is in my opinion more accurate than an iPhone GPS trace near tall buildings. We have more lakes in Canada than exist in the whole of Europe. Most are fairly inaccessible and there is little economic incentive to map each one to a high degree of accuracy. In many provinces they simply haven't spent the cash to map them accurately and recently. Some data is forty or more years old. So digging into the source of the CANVEC data can help to determine how accurate it is. We don't have many mappers per square km in Canada and mapping with a GPS trace doesn't happen at minus 30 for some reason. If I go back in time to before I imported the CANVEC road data into Ottawa basically Ottawa OpenStreetMap was incomplete, inaccurate, over 140 reads had the wrong name when I compared them to the City of Ottawa map. The City of Ottawa map wasn't license to copy but I could at least compare the two. Locally some imports had been done but anywhere an existing road was in the map an area round the existing road was not imported. Fine except that roads were not joined up. You couldn't find a route between two streets in the city. We had a physical local meeting over coffee, I think the first ever in Ottawa and decided the cleanest way was to replace all the highways in Ottawa from CANVEC which we did over a weekend. It probably violated every rule we have now but it gave us a working functional map. Since then we've mapped using traditional methods. We simply didn't have the resources to map every street in Ottawa with local mappers. The City of Ottawa is big, 2,770 square kms. We are the only map that can display either the official French version of the name or the English version. No one else can do this. It works in OSMAND or Maperitive using a special set of rules. This was done with a Visual Basic program that input a .OSM file and took the English name and output another file adding the French version of the street name according to the rules in the City of Ottawa's bylaws. Locally this has generated a lot of goodwill for OpenStreetMap. Canada is not Europe. It is a country but in some ways it is a collection of provinces and each is different. Perhaps if I give you an example of health care. Each province is different. Move from one part of the country to another and you may find you have no health coverage. If you move from one part of the UK to another the NHS will still cover you, whether or not they have the resources to provide a level of service is a different matter. In fact if you move from one part of the EU to another health coverage is automatically available. Europe is different to Canada. Cheerio John On 6 January 2017 at 13:04, Christoph Hormann <chris_horm...@gmx.de> wrote: > On Friday 06 January 2017, john whelan wrote: > > > > I think we should be trying to build the community. We need a > > balance between adding data without limits, and building the > > community and building the community is hard. > > Well - as overzealous as Nakaners intervention in this case might have > been in a way it is a good sign that someone still cares. When Simon > says "Canvec and broken import is essentially a synonym" that is not an > exaggeration, if you mention Canvec in a typical European community > meeting you usually just get a big sigh in return. I for one do not > touch Canada in OSM any more, not even with a ten foot pole. And the > only way this would change is a permanent moratorium on Canvec imports. > > But since i don't see this happening i sincerely hope you are able to > build a big and active community even with the Canvec data - which > seems difficult to me but it is not my place to judge this. > > > My roots are in the UK, I've mapped in the UK using local knowledge. > > I live in Canada. Am I part of the UK local community of mappers? > > To me local community means the community of local mappers. To what > extent a local mapper stays a local mapper after moving away and how > far you can become a local mapper during a short term visit is an open > question. But this is just minor semantics. The important thing is > that OSM is primarily about local knowledge and human assessment of the > on-the-ground situation. > > -- > Christoph Hormann > http://www.imagico.de/ >
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