Canada/Building Canada 2020/municipalities

Information aimed at municipalities.

First some basic information about OpenStreetMap(OSM) https://welcome.openstreetmap.org/why-openstreetmap/

More detailed cases of government and OSM are here https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_for_Government

Typically new streets are mapped much faster than than other sources so OSM is current.

Street name changes can be made directly in OSM by staff. For example Ottawa is an amalgamation of a number of municipalities and has been renaming some streets to avoid confusion for emergency and other services.

On the services for citizens front OSM has mapping for the blind https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_for_the_blind

and disabled https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disabilities which are useful in supporting their citizens or visitors who are partially sighted or disabled.

Note that although OSM supports these locally the map may not have them mapped. Getting this information mapped is often done by local crowd sourcing.

On the cycling front there are numerous maps, layers and routing software available as there are for footpaths to encourage walking so public health benefits. Typically cyclists as a group tend to be active mappers. https://maps.bikeottawa.ca/

On the tourism side the map is multilingual, OSMAND currently supports 79 languages.

It makes it easier to find municipal facilities.

There are economic benefits of many different kinds (traffic control, real estate, marketing and so on). So much so that some commercial companies in the delivery business pay mappers to add detail to OSM.

OSM has been used for countless student GIS projects or as an introduction to GIS.

A comment on Open Data Licensing. Not all Open Data licenses are equal. For example Canada has 3,700 municipalities so there are many variations. Following representations about the limitations of it's first Open Data license The Canadian Federal Government's Treasury Board Secretariat came up with version 2.0 https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada It took a number of years of consultation with a number of organisations before it was created. The City of Ottawa uses a municipal version of this license. https://ottawa.ca/en/city-hall/get-know-your-city/open-data#open-data-licence-version-2-0 both these license have been approved for import into OSM by the OpenStreetMap Legal Working group.