2022 03 22: Meeting OSM x ECF/EuroVelo

tags: meetings with externals

ECF = European Cyclists' Federation
EV = EuroVelo
OSM = OpenStreetMap Belgium
OK = Open Knowledge Belgium

Location: Tandem Bike Café
Present: Dries Van Ransbeeck (OK), Pieter Vander Vennet (OSM), Thierry Jiménez (OSM, board member), Florence Gregoire (EuroVelo-team/ECF), Aleksander Buczynski (Policy Officer ECF), Eleanor Denneman (Infrastructure Policy Intern ECF)

1. Presentation of ECF, EV and the NECC/Cs network

Topics:

  • structure and procedures for developping the EV-network
  • "Subsidiarity principle"
  • EV website and GIS database (gpx tracks + survey data)

*EV started in 2007
*Subsidiarity principle is important. EV-team coordinates the National EV Coordination Centres (= NECC), assesses and certifies an EV-route.
*there's a GIS-subgroup inside the EV-team (Florence, Alek and Eleanor are in)
*website 'eurovelo.com' launched in 2019: in the backend: gpx-data divided into stretches of +/- 50 km
*European Certification Standard -> methodology to asses the quality of routes
*Survey data are collected by trained route inspectors and are analysed internally to certify a EV-route -> a segment is +/- 200 m long (or at least not shorter), this is still susceptible to interpretation
*on the website there are the gpx-tracks of all the EV-routes -> 1 route is fully certified (+/- 1200 km)

2. Presentation of OSM

Topics:

  • Structure, internal communication and decision-making processes of the BE OSM community
  • How does the route editing usually work?

*community in BE is really active via Element chatroom and talk BE mailinglist
*Pieter explained how decision-making process works concerning tagging and wiki-decisions/validation
*route editing is possible via online editors like ID
or via the extensible editor JOSM

3. Collaboration with the OSM community

Topics:

  • Plan for checking, updating and completing EV routes on OSM
  • Roles of ECF and NECC/Cs in coordinating this process
  • Creating standards for EV tagging
  • Extracting other route attributes from OSM
  • How could ECF help the OSM community?

Advantages of working with OSM:

*Meticulously mapping the route will make sure that the routes are absolutely correct and actual cyclist aren't surprised on the route; the continuous maintenance implies that you will be alerted quickly when problems arise. The openness gives rise to thousands of applications and data re-users, which implies that the many cyclists can simply use their favorite navigation system. Lots of websites will pick up the routes automatically, …

*From a technical perspective, you simplify as all data is hosted by OSM and no separate database is needed.

*The biggest advantage is the OSM-community. More and more people and institutions start to realize the importance of a shared database and are starting to structurally contribute to OSM.

Attention!
Before switching to OSM, a thorough introspection is needed on how you'll organize the flow of geodata internally and what needs are (un)met in such a setup. Will OSM be the main source of truth? Or will an internal document/database be the main source of truth, which will be mirrored to OSM? If so, how will synchronization work?
Some training will be necessary to have all the GIS-persons proficient and to know the basic tools.

4. International OSM community

Topics:

  • How to get international agreement on tagging standards?
  • Collaboration and potential differences between countries

*Some standards have already been set on this Wiki page: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Europe/EuroVelo.
The precise tagging will take a while to figure out, but you can build on the Flemish cyclehighway-tagging as we had very similar needs there - including not yet signposted and not yet built (!) roads.
The process for this shall be discussed in a small group of experts, then communicated to all affected communities. They might have some feedback (often very valuable), after which the wiki page can be further updated and actual (re)mapping can begin.

5. Potential challenges

Topics:

  • Copyright of the tracks, EV trademark
  • Quality checks to be informed of changes?

*The copyright should be considered; by adding the routes to OSM, everyone can reuse them under ODbL. This license is very similar to CC-BY-SA, meaning that one is allowed to do anything they want with the data, as long as copyright is given and the data (also on derived products) is kept open.

6) Potential future projects

Topics:

  • Creation of a route planning tool based on OSM data
  • Visualisation tool for the whole network
  • Any other ideas?

*On Waymarked Trails the EuroVelo routes are shown together with other cycle routes mapped in OSM, but you can highlight them individually by hovering over them in the list of routes on the right.

*Superroutes are "relations" that contain "relations" -> e.g. EV3 part Denmark, part Germany, etc
This splitting up is usually done to avoid relations that are too big. More info here

Short term:

  • create a chat group on Element for OSM/EV-team
  • Eleanor & Thierry: create a MapComplete-theme to visualize the EV-routes (we can base ourselves on the cycle highway theme on MapComplete

Medium term:

  • Dries & Pieter: we should strive for a comparison tool (would be also useful for hiking routes (Groute Routepaden/Grandes Randonnées))
    -> this could be a project for Open Summer of Code (= OSOC) in 2022: deadline to submit a project proposal is end of April (latest beginning of May)
    -> note from Joost Schouppe (OSM board member): he proposes to explore first the possibilities of this existing analysis tool for routes
    (a meeting with the developper took place on 1 April 2022)

  • anyways.eu maintains https://www.bikedataproject.org/ - restarted as OSOC-project a few years ago. This open* dataset could be interesting for ECF as well; and having the ECF ask cyclists to donate their tracked data to this project would be really nice too. (*: due to privacy, the raw tracks of the cyclists are not published; but aggregate statistics on road level are. If, for some project, access to the raw tracks is needed, this can be discussed as long as no privacy is harmed)

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