You may have noticed that I have marked a lot of buildings in Nanaimo with notes indicating that each of those buildings has multiple businesses in it. This is because on the next sunny weekend, I will be going down to Nanaimo to survey all of those businesses, and I need to be able to see at a glance which specific buildings I need to survey. I will need to know the exact position of each business within each building, so what I end up putting into OSM as a result of this survey is an as-accurate-as-possible depiction of each building’s “floor plan”, if you will.

Finally! After over four months of near-daily almost painstaking manual editing work in JOSM, entirely using aerial imagery with no automated imports whatsoever, and going through a few episodes of arm and hand cramping, all of the remaining woodland data on Vancouver Island, all the way northwest to Cape Scott, is now present in OpenStreetMap. I hope I was able to depict my own part of the world here just a bit prettier than before.

In case you might have not yet noticed, my current project on OSM is to cover the entire remainder of Vancouver Island with woodland data. I started with my home area of the Comox Valley and am radiating out from there in all directions, eventually finishing up with the area around Cape Scott. Every patch of forest I find in aerial imagery, no matter how expansive, even if the trees are small, will be added.

After just under five months of hard work, I have completed my project of giving every single body of seawater in Canada an area definition. I have experienced some pushback from other editors who had issues with this project, including my practice of only giving one point of seawater a single name, as well as questioned whether area definitions were even necessary and saying that point definitions would have sufficed, as well as how I was defining their extents. However, mapmaking is as much an art as it is a science, and my own preference is for area definitions over point definitions in this case. As well, my “one point, one name” rule had one intent and one positive effect: The intent was to minimize interference with coastline edits, and the positive effect was that I was able to minimize as much as I could the number of ways in each relation, not just for bodies of seawater in a sort of “divide and conquer” strategy, but also for islands as well as for the mainland coastline of Canada. Sure, there were some outliers with thousands of ways, such as the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Labrador Sea, but there are very few of those, and I would estimate the average number of ways in each relation over this whole dataset is only about a few hundred.

In case you are wondering what I am scheming with my recent changesets, I have started converting individually-named bodies of water on the Atlantic coast of Canada to relations. I started with Cobequid Bay, progressed out the Bay of Fundy to Passamaquoddy Bay and St. Marys Bay, and I have subsequently rounded Cape Sable Island and gotten as far northeast as Liverpool Harbour, progressing towards Halifax. What I am intending to do with this series of edits is to make relations for bodies of water throughout the entire coast of Canada, from the Bay of Fundy all the way to the Beaufort Sea. I have already done this for the Pacific coast, and I figured I might continue this through the rest of the coastal areas of the country. And this little pet project is going to take quite a bit of time to complete, given just how vast Canada is and how much coastline she has, the most out of any country in the world.

According to https://ltsa.ca/docs/Land-Districts-of-British-Columbia.pdf, the land area enclosed within relation #11524856 falls within Bright Land District. However, this disagrees with LTSA’s own “ParcelMap BC” service, which depicts this area to be part of Cowichan Lake Land District. This is a discrepancy of about 52.5 km². As a legal document officially declaring this area to be within Cowichan Lake Land District has not been found, I have instead had to use the descriptions given in the linked PDF to draw the boundary between these two land districts, and so OpenStreetMap now depicts this area to be part of Bright Land District.

The description of the boundary between Electoral Areas C and D given in BC Orders-in-Council 3211/1973 and 2772/1975 is legally vague. The problematic text, as given in BC OIC 2772/1975, is shown in bold in the following excerpt, with context given for clarification. “Township 2” is found in Range 3, Coast District:

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“thence northerly along the easterly boundaries of Sections 1 and 12, Township 2, to the point of intersection with the middle line of Bella Coola River;

“thence northwesterly along said middle line to the point of intersection with the northerly boundary of the South Half of Section 12;

“thence westerly along the northerly boundaries of the South Half of Section 12 and the Southeast Quarter of Section 11 to the northwest corner of said Southeast Quarter of Section 11;

“thence west to the point of intersection with the westerly boundary of the watershed of Salloomt River”

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The problem is that the actual westerly boundary of the Salloomt River drainage basin lies to the east of Township 2, and therefore the intersection described in the problematic text does not exist.

A data source that differs from the Order-in-Council text has therefore had to be used to draw the boundary between Electoral Areas C and D, and this data source, which interprets the boundary in the area to which the above problematic text pertains, has been properly attributed.