Hello, I am the data manager for the city of Liège and an on and off contributor to OSM. We’ve been publishing a few datasets since I got here that could be of some interest to mappers.
I was about to suggest parking places for disabled people but it’s already published. You already publish a good set of interesting elements. What about roads, bike-lanes and addresses? Is it up to your services?
Did you have a look at other cities? You can have a look at Lyon, Paris or Bordeaux in you language for a start.
In your existing data, I like the last modified fields. Useful for keeping OpenStreetMap data up to date.
Thank you for wanting to contribute all this data to OSM!
I’m looking at the opendata page and I’m noticing that most of these datasets are marked as “CC BY” for their data license. I don’t think that license is actually compatible with Openstreetmap’s ODBL license.
Maybe a first step would be to see if this license could be changed to something more compatible?
EDIT: in Flanders this license is often used: Modellicentie Gratis Hergebruik | Vlaanderen Intern
Both the gov of Flanders and the city of Ghent for ex, use it. And that is compatible with osm’s ODBL license. So maybe there’s a similar license somewhere for Wallonia
I started this process a while ago, but it didn’t end up working out that time. The legal departement of the city didn’t end up providing us with correct wording. I’m still trying to push for a simplification of the text, it just takes a lot of time and is no-one’s priority but mine.
Roads are more complex due to the fact that some are managed by the region and some by the city. But I am pushing for us to publish our cartography associated with BestAddress.
This is exactly the kind of feedback I’m interested about, for us, and for the futurocite working group (which regularly tries to reinvent OSM, but without learning from it).
This data is absolutely useful, and thank you for reaching out! One thing I’d like to point out is that our capacity to consume datasets like this is lower than the availability of similar datasets
One reason is that every external dataset has some issues, and we don’t want to just copy-paste those issues. Plus we are very likely to already have some data on the topics you share. Then we need to confalte datasets: we don’t want to erase existing work, but rather improve what exists already (or even: make sure we don’t make existing OSM data worse). This all means it takes a lot of thinking and a lot of work to use this data in the best way. The upshot is that it also provides an opportunity to the data source: we can provide a lot of feedback about specific issues in the official data, which can improve your data as well.
But we’re talking about quite a bit of work, and we don’t have many people in Liege. So what I think would be ideal, is that we define one or two priority datasets (that are interesting both to you and to us), and that we work on those. Perhaps we can do a local event to raise awareness, where a little push from the city when it comes to attrecting new people would be extremely welcome.
I absolutely understand this, I’ve had time to think about how hard it would be to create a bidirectional synchro between OSM and our system.
It would imply linking every single existing feature in both systems by hand. Any new node existing only in one system would have to be checked, and every change to sync would have to be approved manually.
This kind of system would allow us to double check both our data as well as OSM’s. But this is hard ™ and not just from a technical standpoint. The validation cannot be automated.
I’m happy to be the bridge between the city and the appropriate services. Bringing new datasets to life takes a lot of time (we need to setup internal processes and assign people to make sure it’s updated in a timely manner and not just created and never updated), but improving existing ones is much easier (thanks to those processes).
We have also been working with the public space departement to integrate cartography right into their process instead of being an afterthought. I can’t say if it’ll go live in 2023, but that would benefit both our datasets and the citizens.
I’ve proposed this internally already and we did that with the waze community a while back before starting the Tram roadworks. I always love to meetup with communities, and I know for a fact that a few people here will participate, with or without the backing of the city.
It’s absolutely worth the ™ if you want a fully fledged comparison system. But there’s reasonably easy options as well. For example, MapComplete (ping @Pieter_Vander_Vennet ) has a module that lets you check if all your bicycle parkings are already in OSM (with a definibale buffer). If it’s not, it can turn your parking into a Note, which we can then check in the field. And the tool has a bit of a management interface, where you can follow up on the feedback. If the Note response is “this thing does not exist”, then you have one fix to do on your end. But of course, that still means someone in the administration has to check again on their end.
I suggest you have a look at Le Bon Tag. This is an open-source solution used by some cities in France (Montpellier and Brest are some of them).
On one side, the cities directly contribute in OSM, as well as usual contributors. On the other side, are the city data. This tool will show what has been modified in OSM and you accept it or not. Features includes themes (maybe you want to survey only bicycle parkings), users, groups, trusted users (for automatic import), and so on. I guess it’s only in French right now but the team would be happy with translations.
