OpenStreetMap
Celebrating Open Data Maps in Taiwan -- By Tracing it Hard
Posted by Littlebtc on 28 August 2015 in English.The Open Data movement in Taiwan is growing fast. In July, after half year of discussions between authorities and communities, the data.gov.tw platform released a new, permissive, CC-BY convertible open data license. It is a game changer for the open data community, and now for the OpenStreetMap Taiwan mappers.
In this week, the National Land Surveying and Mapping Center, or the NLSC, announced open data edition of Taiwan e-Map under new open data license. The zoom level of the open data edition is limited to 1/18000 or z15, but it already contains a lot of data that is not available in any other sources.
Great quality of NLSC maps
And most importantly, the accuracy of NLSC maps is superior. Take a look at it with Strava Heatmap. It is accurate not only for the downtown:
But also for mountain area where accurate orthophoto is hard to achieve:
I beilieve it has < 3m accuracy for most highways in Taiwan. For now, it should be available for tracing.
Celebrate by Tracing!
The community is very happy with that, and now we are working hard on tracing things that is not available before. Take Da-Yeh University for example, both Bing and Mapbox are not working, but now we can trace the place with NLSC data:
And a lot of village streets in Changhua. (In fact, in Changhua, you can only find the ref in maps!)
Go out and map more!
I know that OpenStreetMap is all about “local knowledge”, but the openness of more map sources should give us more opportunity to get a better result in less time.
The cloudy imagery in Changhua made the map progress there slower. It is now finally resolved with Strava Heatmap and NLSC Open Data. Now people can add more POIs without wondering why no roads present here.
Now it is time to go out and map more!
Discussion
Comment from SimpleLuke on 30 August 2015 at 03:41
Good work, Open Data Community and NLSC! And congratulations for Taiwan OSM Community getting such a valuable map source.
I am wondering how the open data community negotiate with the government to acquire the rights to trace the official data. Don’t the officials worry about security affairs of military areas or somthing by providing z15 data? You know here in the PRC, the officials refuse to do so on the excuse of national security.
Comment from geoeki on 30 August 2015 at 11:41
Great to hear! Keep up the good work :-)
Comment from Littlebtc on 31 August 2015 at 09:37
The military areas are already ignored in official map data, so it is not a concern for us :)
Comment from Littlebtc on 31 August 2015 at 09:53
If you can read Chinese, you can read this wonderful slide about changes of governement license: http://www.slideshare.net/LucienCHLin/20150816-revision-of-the-taiwan-open-government-data-license-10
It was made after discussions between the government affairs like Executive Yuan and National Development Council, and communities like g0v.tw and Open Data Alliance Taiwan. The license , espcially the CC-BY convertible part, was strong affected by efforts made in Germany, UK and Japan. In Taiwan, It took g0v a day to write license draft, but half year of discussions to have a newer license.
Also, OSM Taiwan mappers and NLSC had got in touch simutaneously during the discussions. So much hard work made us able to trace today. :)
Comment from Littlebtc on 31 August 2015 at 09:59
Historically the map in Taiwan was under heavy “security” concern due to the civil war between ROC and PRC (plus: You must draw the mainland China as the ROC still owned it). This concern was then gradually degraded with democracy status of Taiwan. In 2004, the map in Taiwan no longer required government review before publishing (Now PRC still required it.)
All of the government map will erase all military zones for security concern though. But the law to enforce that is becoming unclear., especially after the AH-64E leak scandal in Taiwan.