Canada/Building Canada 2020/OSMGeoWeek2017

Building Canada 2020 will be a theme of several mapathons across Canadian Universities for OSMGeoWeek, November 12-18, 2017.

Check out a Mapbox Blog Post regarding #BC2020 mapathons!

Below you can find documentations on the events.

Plan

There will be tasks set up on Canada's OSM Tasking Manager for mapathon participants to contribute to. These tasks will be focused on adding buildings to rural areas in Canada. The tasks will have details on where to map and what to map.

Register

If you are hosting a mapathon during OSMGeoWeek2017, please submit your event through the OSMGeoWeek's Sign-Up Form. Your submission may take a couple of days to appear on the map.

Confirmed Universities Participating

• Carleton University Building Canada 2020 Mapathon
• McGill University
• Selkirk College
• University of Calgary
• University of Waterloo
• Ryerson University
• University of Winnipeg
• Red River College

Media

Inform the public about your mapathon (#osmgeoweek). During the OSMGeoWeek use #osmgeoweek2017 and #BC2020!

Recommendations

• Before starting the mapping phase of the mapathon, educate the participants on what OSM is and the community behind the project
• Complete tasks that exist on the Canada OSM Tasking Manager. These tasks will focus on geographic areas in Canada that have not been mapped already. This will avoid changing already existing data
• Invite an active OSM contributor to your mapathon to share their experiences and expertise! You can reach out to the Canadian OSM community on the Talk-ca (OSM Canada Talk) listserv

Resources

• OSMGeoWeek has several guides for contributing to OSM
• TeachOSM has guides for how best to teach OSM in your classroom and how best to grade students on contributions
• LearnOSM has guides for beginner mappers
• OSM Buildings wiki page details standards for mapping buildings on OSM
• Mapillary's 'Adding Building Attributes to OpenStreetMap' guide
• Missing Map's 'Hosting a Mapathon' checklist

Mapathon Results

To see the results from the contributions, view an interactive visualization here. The actual data for analysis is accessible here.

The next steps for the mapathon contributions are validation. Please review the information below.

Validation

As important as it is to map, it even more important to ensure the data is of good quality. Validating the mapathon contributions can ensure good quality data.

Validation can be completed in the tasks. It is recommended to complete validation in JOSM with the building_tool plugin. When you are adjusting a poor contribution, it is ok to make changes, but also write a comment to the user indicating why you are making changes (e.g., "Your building was not aligned" or "Your building was not squared"). The Validator Tool will also uncover inconsistencies within OSM data including crossing buildings, house numbers without streets and quite a few other issues. Its built into JOSM and instructions here: JOSM/Validator.

The following are guidelines to validate the quality of the contributed buildings. These guidelines are summarized points from "OSM Tasking Manager/Validating data":

• 1) Select a square that is marked as "Done"
• 2) Make sure there are no missing buildings
• 3) Make sure the buildings are squared. An example can be seen here. If a building is not squared, leave a comment indicating to the user that they should have square it. Within JOSM you can search "building nodes:-7" to see which buildings have not been squared.
• 4) Make sure buildings are correctly aligned
• 5) Make sure no buildings are sharing nodes with other buildings if they are detached homes

Unsure if a building is good or bad? View the OSM Buildings wiki page for details on best methods for mapping buildings on OSM.