Help with cleaning up import in Sarnia

Communities Canada
,
1

Hi all,

User @NuSarnia_Demetrius https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/NuSarnia_Demetrius/history has imported a bunch of data in Sarnia in October 2025. According to the changesets, this data comes from Sarnia Open Data. Per Terms of Use, the data is available under “Open Government Licence – City of Sarnia”, which is not currently an approved OGL variant (this is the usual problem of Canadian OGL variants appending the city name to the license name, see OSMF wiki).

There are also quality problems, such as park names being given in all uppercase, and many parks duplicating already-mapped parks (e.g. Way: ‪CANATARA‬ (‪1436785489‬) | OpenStreetMap vs Way: ‪Canatara Park‬ (‪117879910‬) | OpenStreetMap), or an apparently disused bus stop being imported (with description=Health Centre - Out of Service).

I don’t have energy and patience for cleaning this up, so I favoured a wholesale revert. I raised this with DWG (ticket #2026022510000043) whereupon Clifford Snow @Glassman contacted the uploader (who asserted that license is compatible as “based on” OGL-Canada). Clifford suggested that the license could be approved by LWG and the data cleaned up.

Is there anyone who would like to do that?

I guess we’d want to do the following:

  1. get the license properly approved as per steps on OGL Canada and local variants - OpenStreetMap Foundation (basically diff the license text to an approved OGL Canada license, and email the OSM Legal Working Group) [1]
  2. go through all the changesets, fix park names to not be uppercase, merge duplicates where parks were already mapped [2], check if tagging on imported data is good [3]

Or if no one volunteers to clean up, just revert :person_shrugging:

  1. If doing this, and you have time, might want to also do it for other not-currently-approved OGL licenses listed on Canada - OpenStreetMap Wiki ↩︎

  2. the import has some new information like addresses, so optimally it’s not just a matter of deleting the new objects ↩︎

  3. e.g. disused bus stops, parks tagged using addr:full ↩︎

2

I have emailed LWG asking them about using the data from the city. I would suggest holding off any reverts until we get a response. It may take a while since I understand that they are short staffed.

1 Like
3

Maybe better to revert right now, while it still can be done and then restore data if it turns to be usable?

Or is it too late for a clean revert without conflicts?

2 Likes
4

I favoured a revert, and still do – especially given the two weeks of no activity here or from LWG – but I consider the decision to do so to be DWG’s