WikiProject Fiji/Administrative Boundaries 2016 Import

Goals

Since 2011 UNICEF has been working to give voice to the youth through the U-Report project, which is a social messaging tool allowing anyone from any community to respond to polls, report issues, support child rights and work as positive agents of change on behalf of people in their country.

U-Report uses OSM boundary data to show from which place (city, district, region, etc) users are responding to polls. Since 2016, UNICEF has been developing a U-Report instance for Fiji. At the moment there is no administrative boundary data in OSM for Fiji, therefore the goal of this import project is to add such data from an official Fiji Government source.

Schedule

In July 2016, the Fiji UNICEF office hired Ilhasoft to perform the import of administrative boundary data.

In August, John Cordeiro from Ilhasoft attempted to import boundaries from an existing dataset, but only the nodes were eventually imported. See these changesets. Since that import was not discussed with the OSM community, does not include the correct geometries and is not supported by an authorization letter, it must be reverted.

In September, Nelson Pinto from Ilhasoft wrote a message to the Imports mailing list explaining the project and that a letter of authorization for using government data was obtained. The response from other OSM user was that the letter of authorization is not clear enough and needs to be re-obtained with explicit permission to using the data in OSM under an ODBL compatible license. It needs to be clear with the authorizing provider that such license allows for any use of the data, including commercial ones.

As of 28 September 2016 Ilhasoft and UNICEF are working to obtain a clear authorization letter.

As soon as the authorization is obtained, Ilhasoft will work together with experienced OSM members to proceed with the import. Every step will be discussed with the community, the Imports lists and documented here. Ivan, Rafael and Cristiano have offered to oversee the import process.

Import Data

Data description

The original file is in ESRI geodatabase format and can be found here

Background

The first letter of authorization can be downloaded here. As explained above and discussed by Tilman here this letter is not sufficient to allow the import.

Import Type

Ivan Garcia created a python script that automates conversion from original format to an OSM file for import. More details can be found here.