[Geodata] Ottawa Open Atlas

[Dave Sampson]

Hey folks,

probably been close to a year since I last posted. It looks like lots of 
good progress has been made in various areas.

I thought I could tap into the group and grab some opinions, expertise 
and guidance. 

I am interested in starting a project that for right now has the working 
title of "Ottawa Open Atlas". This project will hopefully turn into a 
repository of geographic data layers of interest to Ottawa Ontario 
Canada. These will be for people to use under an open license for 
public, private and commercial use.

In Canada we have fantastic base data and I am interested in building 
upon that. Everything from streetlights to fire hydrants and storm 
sewers to schools, fire stations, police and ambulance.

I have been using PAGC http://www.pagcgeo.org/ for the geocoding of many 
features with civic addresses, including the 800 some odd city parks we 
have.  To gain interest in my efforts I would like to of course have a 
web presence.

part of this web presence will be to build a community of people 
interested in contributing, updating and consuming the data. being a fan 
of OSGEO I am trying to iplement a full open source infrastructure 
(trivial). Being a fan of openess I will be using all OGC web services, 
and in some cases a direct postgis connection for data managers.

I have looked at many different models including the clasics like open 
Street maps. But those projects either seem to be using proprietary 
services, have no services, retain rights to the data or use 
incompatible licensing structures.

One of my barriers of course is going to be bandwidth. working on a 
residential ADSL line people will not like the services. For displaying 
the web pages it will be fine for now until we scale.

So I am wondering if there is any chance of using any OSGEO resources 
such as the data repository and such. I got lost following all the wiki 
page discussions and found the dead end at http://geodata.telascience.org/

Essentialy I am looking for a means to store data and tap into OGC 
services to serve the data out. Also allow access for a group of people 
to edit tables, data and such... almost a virtual server.

The idea is for the project to start small and see if the interest 
exhists. I see schools as one source of willing labour as they do their 
projects and class assignments in geo. Universities could have various 
research to serve out to Ottawa. many community groups could benifit 
from free data.

perhaps if the project proves worth while we might have a geo_dvd, or CD 
that people can either download the ISO or purchase a hard copy. At that 
point we'd have a means to pay for our own hosting to sustain the 
project and the telascience could remain as part of the repository 
structure, maybe a mirror. But these are all theoretical until we see if 
the project flies.

Ok, I am ready for the opinions. GO!

Cheers



Any ideas?