2009/2/15 Feargal Hogan <[email protected]>: > Hi > > First post to the list. > > I've been looking to get access to a set of polygons for the main English > administrative divisions. I'm not that concerned with the celtic regions for > the time being. This data <<IS>> available via ONS/OS but with licencing > restrictions. Better to use/create a free-to-use set, I thought. > > Working on the basis that I needed to create it myself, I took the list of > schools at http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk/call/data.html#schools and > matched it against the NPE postcode data. It only managed to geocode about > 5% of the schools, but it was enough for my next proof-of-concept step. > Using the data I was able to create voronoi cells for each Local Education > Authority (well each one that contained at least one postcode in the NPE > dataset). > > These were not very accurate in most cases, but some data is better than > none. > > My next step was to see if I could 'help' the voronoi analysis by excluding > the areas where there was already free boundary polygons available. This > took me back to OSM. So I extracted the boundary data for England using > something like > http://osmxapi.hypercube.telascience.org/api/0.5/*[boundary=administrative][ > bbox=-4.65,50.1,2,55.4] > and had a good browse through it to see what I was getting. The > 'free-tagging' nature of the OSM data (and this is not a criticism, just an > observation) means that it is difficult to quantify the quality of the data, > and also it is difficult to filter the dataset into something meaningful and > useful, at least for my purposes. > > I figure that I am going to have to do a fair bit of clean-up on this data > before it is useful to me. What would be a real waste of time would be for > me to do all the cleanup, and then NOT reflect it back into the OSM dataset. > Whilst I have done quite a bit of interactive editing using potlatch and > josm, I haven't done any dataset uploads. > > So my questions are: > 1) How should I approach such a data cleanup operation? and > 2) Are there any agreed data tagging standards for the UK or more > specifically for England? > > Appreciate any comments or suggestions you might have. > Thks > Feargal Hogan >
I'm also interested in the boundary data for the UK, I've been doing some tidying of the data using the OSM Inspector tool. The only real tagging standard that is specific to the UK is the admin_level values as defined on the wiki: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:boundary#10_admin_level_values_for_specific_countries In short, most of the data just isn't in OSM yet to a detailed standard. Most of what is in has been derived from the 1940s NPE OS maps, so may be terribly outdated. On the plus side, even in the past week, there has been significant additions to the data, which has quite surprised me. OSM Boundary Inspector: http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=boundaries&lon=-1.27464&lat=52.32253&zoom=7&opacity=0.66 -- Regards, Thomas Wood (Edgemaster) _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
