CanVec
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Scripted imports and automated edits should only be carried out by those with experience and understanding of the way the OpenStreetMap community creates maps, and only with careful planning and consultation with the local community. See Import/Guidelines and Automated Edits/Code of Conduct for more information. |
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Summary
CanVec is a digital cartographic reference product produced by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). CanVec originates from the best available data sources covering Canadian territory and offers quality topographic information in vector format that complies with international geomatics standards.
CanVec is a multi-source product derived from the former National Topographic Data Base (NTDB) and GeoBase initiative datasets (www.geobase.ca). CanVec product contains more than 90 topographic entities organized into 11 themes. See Natural Resources Canada GeoGratis website for more details.
Natural Resource Canada supports the work done by the Canadian Openstreetmap Community by offering an .osm version of its Canvec product. This product can be uploaded in Openstreetmap database using Josm, Merkaator or other editing tools. The Canvec product is available here under this licence.
Import Warnings
Many experienced OSM users have inadvertently broken parts of the map while importing Canvec data. If you are going to import data from the NRCAN .OSM files please try to keep the following in mind
- Do not try to import changes to the coastline or large lakes unless you have substantial experience both editing coastlines and importing Canvec data. You should have a good understanding of how coastlines are rendered and tagged.
- Avoid importing duplicate features. In the past many people have added features (roads, forests, lakes,...) on top of an existing data for the same physical object. Other people have imported Canvec files on top of an earlier less complete Canvec import resulting in duplicate features. Don't do this. Check every object you import to avoid duplicating an existing object
- Monitor keepright after your import so you can find and fix errors introduced by your import.
Canvec Product - Osm format
- The geometric model is described in the page below
- The entities tagging is described in the corresponding pages below
CanVec: Buildings and structures (BS)
CanVec: Energy (EN)
CanVec: Relief and landforms (FO)
CanVec: Hydrography (HD)
CanVec: Industrial and commercial areas (IC)
CanVec: Administrative boundaries (LI)
CanVec: Places of interest (LX)
CanVec: Water saturated soils (SS)
CanVec: Toponymy (TO)
CanVec: Transportation (TR) - Roads and railways (airport, ferry)
CanVec: Vegetation (VE)
- The product is tiled based on National Topographic System (NTS) map sheets - see Canada_NTS_Tile_System or http://geonames.nrcan.gc.ca/search/search_e.php . Each map sheet is subtiled using a quadtree algorithm. Subtree naming convention is SW=0, NW=1, NE=2, SE=3. A tile is split when there are more than 25K nodes in it. Each tile is a separate .osm file. All files are zipped together.
Canvec Product - Datasets
The Canvec.osm datasets are available here.
They are provided to the community under the standard Canvec Product Licence.
Import process
To keep track of what is going on with Canvec Import. Tiles that are being imported by an Osm contributor are identified in google docs chart, as 'Work in Progress' / planning / complete. -
If you wish to import Canvec tiles to a "white space" in OSM, just look at the chart...
- If it is listed as "Work in progress", choose an other area;
- If not, register the Canvec tile name in the list below and start to import;
- add in more rows to the chart as needed
- When finished all 4 quadrents of an area, remove the extra 3 rows so to just have 1 row indicating the larger tile name.
- Please see the Canvec Import Status Google Doc's chart for details of the progress. The chart is open to Public Access, and it maintained by User:Acrosscanadatrails. It is requested to sign in with a username (so then others know who is working on the chart). If you would like editing access, please just ask the talk-ca list, or #osm-ca IRC chat.
- Of course, everyone is free to use it or not :-)
- Use the various Canada WMS Layers (Toporama, GeoBaseNHN and NTS tile view and mapnik slippy map to easily compare features to be able to trace when needed.
- Keep in touch on the talk-ca discussion list, the community is happy to help
- Keep in touch on the #osm-ca IRC, the more people online, the easier it is to get your questions answered
- This is the Google Docs chart showing all the features with its current status. (if approved by the community) (external to the above wiki charts) (The Wiki Chart is more current as of acrosscanadatrails 01:53, 24 April 2010 (UTC))
CanVec in .img
User:Acrosscanadatrails is converting the canvec.osm.zip files (NTS size & quad-tree sized) files directly into CanVec Garmin IMG files format. These files will be available to download from http://www.mediafire.com/acrosscanadatrails in the sub-folder '[NTS Grid All Data]' organized by NTS tile. These Maps Can be used in conjunction with the [Lambertus OSM-world-routable] Garmin Maps as well as the Provincial Garmin Maps that are created from Cloudmade .osm files (usually 2 weeks old) Please ask on the talk-ca discussion list if you want updated maps. The purpose of creating this, is that the actual import process is done manually & by local area mappers who know the area best, and they can verify the accuracy of this CanVec data, better than somoene else remotely. So to continue with regular mapping, these files are made available until all of CanVec has been imported. This manual import is an on-going process, with no actual end-date as the data keeps on getting updated.
- 010N16 http://www.mediafire.com/file/0mjez0unjqt/55555555 010N16 CanVec_routable.img
- 011D12 Halifax Garmin IMG routable is available here http://www.mediafire.com/file/hmzcywwztig/55555555 011D12 CanVec_routable.img
- 021L14 Quebec http://www.mediafire.com/file/r3rgdv5xjoy/55555555 _021L14 CanVec_routeable.img
- 022C07 Rimouski http://www.mediafire.com/file/xxzbf3z3f5x/55555555 022C07 Canvec routable.img
Screencasts of CanVec Imports
In this series of videos I go through the process of importing CanVec, from the simple situations up to the more complex. I make the assumption that the user has basic working knowledge of JOSM (eg. they have several hours of basic node/way/relation editing).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyfZ7hFIfKc Introduction to NTS tiling and how to download a tile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR0OrnACPHk A simple CanVec import into an empty area of OSM. I forgot to mention in the video that when you are in the upload window, you should go to the "Advanced" tab, and make sure you are set to upload data in chunks of size 5000. If you get an upload timeout error don't panic - press the upload button again without changing anything, and JOSM will attempt to pick up where it left off. The next time you upload an import, try setting the chunk size even lower, like 500 objects.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJr_gucFGMY Importing the neighbouring tile to the first. Since we are importing an area next to one we've already imported, we need to join ways and areas.
CanVec Versions
These are the versions of Canvec product that were converted to OSM format by Natural Resources Canada
CanVec 10
Processing started on April 04, 2012
Changes from previous release:
- There is no more “Here be Dragons” areas in the Canvec product! NRCan has just completed Canada's mapping at 50K scale.
- Municipal Boundaries for SK,MB,NB,YT,NT and NU - linear - are available.
- Water definition: natural=water now fits with coastline definition (hight water level).
Known issues (not necessarily errors, but things that importers should be aware of):
- Roads in QC that are newer then Release 6 are tagged with surface=unpaved and lanes=-1.
- Roads in BC with a direction in the name (e.g. name=Cedar East) have an extra space
- highway=service in parts of BC have surface=unpaved regardless of if they are paved
CanVec 8
Processing started on August 11, 2011 and finished on September 27, 2011
Changes from previous release:
- Swapped amenity=school/prison tag values corrected
- Misspelled tag value on highway=unclassified corrected.
- Duplicated railway=rail features removed.
- Single node natural=land within natural=water inner polygon created only if a name tag is attached to it.
- Multiple consecutive spaces in name tag are removed.
- name:fr/name:en applied on all features when available.
- Surfaces orientation respect right-hand rule.
- Missing large polygons should have been corrected (to confirm).
Known issues (not necessarily errors, but things that importers should be aware of):
- Water (natural=water) represents permanent water and doesn't fit with coastline definition (high water level). Permanent water (natural=water) must be merged with intermittent water (natural=water; water=intermittent) to create a high water level definition. High risk of errors if used to replace natural=coastline.
CanVec 7
Processing was started on November 30, 2010 and finished on January 25, 2011.
Changes from previous release:
- Contains Manitoba street names.
- Updated road network for Quebec, including addressing.
- Updated hydrography for BC coastal areas.
- natural=land area features are no longer a duplicate of natural=water inner polygon. These are now single node point features.
- natural=peak features are now present.
- updated vegetation for some areas in eastern Canada.
- landform=beach replaced by natural=beach for rendering reasons.
- Areas that were tagged aeroway=runway in previous release are now tagged aeroway=apron to match with OSM definition. aeroway=runway and aeroway=taxiway will have to be added manually.
- Some fixme tags are clarified.
Known issues (not necessarily errors, but things that importers should be aware of):
- Single node natural=land within natural=water inner polygon are created even if there is no name tag attached to it.
- Quebec contains some "planned" roads that have not actually been constructed in the real world yet.
- Nodes that should be tagged as amenity=school are incorrectly tagged as amenity=prison, while ways that should be tagged as amenity=prison are incorrectly tagged as amenity=school.
- In rare cases, wooded areas covering the majority of a subtile may be missing. These can be identified if neighbouring subtiles are largely wooded areas.
- Duplication of ways tagged railway=rail
- Some roads are tagged as "highway=unclasified" (with one 's'). These are mostly linking roads, and usually have the name "Voie" (in Quebec)
- Most, if not all, road names (in highways and address nodes) have multiple consecutive spaces.
- highway=unclassified misspelled as unclasified
CanVec 6
Processing was started on July 5, 2010 and finished on September 4, 2010 (including addendum reprocessing).
Known issues (not necessarily errors, but things that importers should be aware of):
- In BC, cardinal direction prefixes are succeeded by three spaces (eg. "West 8th Avenue"). This is not an issue with the CanVec conversion, but is an error in the original BC data.
- Bridges are not given a "layer" tag, since it is undetermined which layer each object goes in for multi-layer areas.
- Possible problem tagging natural=bay objects.
- Some street addresses will be -1. This means the name of the street (or lake) exists but the address is not known in the original provincial agency data.
- Watersheds that touch the ocean in BC have erroneous position for hydrography (streams).
- Buildings are several years old, and may be out of date.
- Some areas in northern Canada are missing, due to lack of survey (Ellesmere, Baffin).
- leisure=sports_centre was incorrectly tagged as leisure=sport_centre (missing second 's')
- Missing natural=peaks nodes
- Some ways and relations in Manitoba are missing certain natural=* tags. Apparently this is related to the missing natural=peaks problem, and will be fixed in the next release.
