Hey all, I've been following the discussions about the geobase import with interest. There seems to be some concern about how to correlate the existing OSM data with the Geobase dataset. In particular, how do we get the superior positioning and connectivity of geobase without blowing away all the great work people have done tagging their manually inputted ways?
This topic is of some interest to me, as I've been using both GeoBase and OSM data in a project of mine called hbus.ca (linky: http://hbus.ca), which is basically a transit mapper for the Halifax Regional Municipality. Right now, I'm using OpenStreetMap data for the map view, and geobase information (the NRN road network) for the site's geocoding and pathfinding capabilities. From my perspective, it would be really great to get the GeoBase information in for Halifax, as OSM coverage for the outer areas of the HRM is rather poor. One alternative which I haven't heard mentioned is the possibility of _merging_ the two datasets. That is, writing an automated script that does the following for a given region: 1. Look up all named OSM ways. 2. For each way: - Finds the corresponding GeoBase segments with the same name and the same proximate positioning. Obviously some cleverness will be required here. I've written a geocoder which should be able to help with the naming bit. The positioning part is a computational geometry problem which can be solved in a number of ways -- I'd need to do some experimenting to see what works best. - Merge any tags from the existing OSM way (e.g. cyclespeed) which cannot be expressed with the GeoBase road gml files. - Replace the OSM nodes with GeoBase ones. As a disclaimer, I've never written any code which actually interacts with the openstreetmap server (I've only done operations on raw OSM files), so there might be a step or two I'm missing. Other than that, can anyone see a reason why this wouldn't work? Ordinarily this is something I'd just go ahead and try (I'm planning to give it a shot next week), but I thought I'd bring it up here now since the topic is up for discussion. -- William Lachance <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
