> The Geoboutique site also has lots of other interesting data, like > orthophotos. Too bad they're expensive. $65 per file, and there are > thousands of them. However, we wouldn't "need" that data per se, but if > it would only be available to OSM for tracing purposes (like Yahoo), > that would already be very much appreciated :)
Good point ! I don't know how Yahoo can provide the data to OSM for free for tracing purposes and in other circumstances sell it to private customers. The Québec air photo data may be a different beast inasmuch as IIRC there is one single private provider. One thing I would try to find out is how much money the government of Québec (Geoboutique is the government) makes out of selling the air photo coverage it paid for. The logic is pretty basic here : the government wants to recoup costs. I'll put my toe in water and put forth this hypothesis : Geoboutique doesn't make a whole lot of money selling air photos. There. Please prove me wrong. If they don't get much money from sales (and please let's factor in the cost of the computing infrastructure needed to sell the data), then there may be open ears for sharing data for community purposes. The other thing is I'm not sure there is a strong will from the government to set up an infrastructure to share it's geodata. If there is to be a special agreement between OSM and the government for tracing purposes, there will be a need for such an infrastructure. I just dropped by Geoboutique and I can't get much out of their website on my Ubuntu laptop : "Ce site est optimisé pour le fureteur Internet Explorer version 6.". In fact I complained two years ago that Geoboutique (or some other geodata government site) *required* not only IE, but Microsoft's JVM for it to work properly. A year later Firefox users were simply told to use IETab to view the site ... The site says not it is "optimized" for IE6. Point is : the logic here is proprietary, cost-recouping and IE oriented infrastructure. And it'll probably be like that for as long as politicians want even though data sales are probably nowhere near what they'd need to be to recover costs. Prove me wrong ;-). Yves > > Frank _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
