Re: UnSummit
Posted by
john whelan on
Jun 06, 2017; 5:38pm
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/UnSummit-tp7677p7679.html
In my experience Open Data takes patience and time. Simple things like bringing in the bus stop locations from City of Ottawa took five years. However things are beginning to fall into place. Stats Canada is using OpenStreetMap to collect data on buildings in Ottawa and young Tracey was instrumental in the process. Licensing was an issue but following the Treasury Board licensing guidelines meant the City of Ottawa Open Data can now be used.
TB has announced a tool kit for municipalities and with them hoping to gain a better understanding of their buildings I'm hopeful that their Open Data license will become more useful. More bus stops for a start. Most transport systems make their data available in GTFS format but getting the Open Data license right as well can be a problem. So a major step here has been getting OSM to accept Open Data. The hope is we can get more in over time.
For GIS data there is something called R. R.org The NGOs that are involved in HOT (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team)
www.hotosm.org are pulling data out of OpenStreetMap and combining it with other data using R. It's taking time but my hope is we can come up with a series of applications that assist urban and rural planning in Africa where they don't have the cash for the more conventional planning tools. My understanding is a number of economists in Montreal are very excited about the building data in Ottawa because the cost of working with building data and combining it with other data has been a major problem for researchers.
Since this is essentially software there is a nice research project for someone to document the process and list the advantages of planning for various levels of government. In one area of Zambia using people who worked for the city in GIS areas they mapped all the buildings in one section of the city and working backwards realised that there were three times as many buildings as they had thought which in turn meant roughly three times their population estimate. How many vaccine shots do you need?
Since the format of OSM is the same world over the same techniques can be applied anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately the cost of getting Robert out of Zambia to talk about his use of open data is a little expensive. However HOT is organising a world wide summit in Ottawa September 14th and 15th 2017. Could you build on that?
Cheerio John
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