Data Sources

[nealf]

This issue is relevant initially to this project, but ultimately will impact lots of future projects that involve spatial components. Please provide any thoughts or feedback you might have!

Current status

Our current road segments (and sidewalks) came from the Town of Blacksburg. While the sidewalk data is from 2014 (and contains a lot of "paved surface" such as sidewalks going to houses, not just public sidewalks), the road data is from an unknown earlier time period. While I think it is important to maintain an integration with this "official" data source, I think to stay on top of things and be able to roll out map updates quickly, we should be looking to have something we can update ourselves.

Maintaining our own data

One option would be to just take what we've gotten from the town and start building on top of it with changes. This would certainly allow us to meet the goal of making updates quickly, but I think provides the community as a whole with little benefit, even if we were making the data publicly available. Also, as we expand beyond Blacksburg, we'd need to insert and update data from other municipalities.

Using OpenStreetMap

I think that my preferred method for handling map updates and data is to use OSM as our data repository, pulling the data into our own PostGIS database at regular intervals to use for whatever purposes we need. OSM already has a great ecosystem of tools for updating data (and some great data already exists there that I don't even think the municipalities will have). It would give us the advantage of both taking advantage of updates made by others outside of our group as well as contributing back to a map and data source that is easily used by others. With our periodic pulls and inserts into our own PostGIS system, we would need to try to do some basic validation, just to make sure others haven't unintentionally added or edited bad data into OSM (for which I think there are some tools available to aid in that process). Maybe a bit more work, but in my opinion is probably the best two-way data street.