2.2 Million Trackpoints!
I’ve been meaning to blog about this sooner, but have been pretty busy with work. A chance email on a NZ GIS list that I belong to two weeks ago, inspired me to go out on a limb and see if I could get some Government data. I saw a post from someone within the Transit (soon to be merged into the New Zealand Transport Agency) refering to working with 2.2 million trackpoints from a roading survey. I started a private email discussion, and after a couple discussions, I soon had 2.2 million trackpoints from the 2008 High Speed Data Collection survey of New Zealand State Highway network.
My intention of obtaining this data was to be able to convert it to GPX files and upload it as a raw data survey layer to OpenStreetMap (OSM) so that it could be used as the basis for mapping New Zealand’s State Highway network in OSM.
I had some help from John McCombs from Integrated Mapping in Christchurch who very kindly reprojected all the points to WGS84. I then spent 4 evenings last week converting to GPX and uploading the files to OSM.
Was this data essential to mapping the highways in OSM? No. But it was a great experiment to see if a New Zealand Government Agency was willing to release data under acceptable terms and conditions – this dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons v3 Attritbution ShareAlike license, and effectively turn the raw data over for public consumption. Naturally, this doesn’t contain all of the detailed geometry that is collected during the survey, so not all of the data was made available, but we got the most important – latitude and longitude, and a lot of them!
For more information, see the following links.
- Transit High Speed Data Collection on gis.org.nz wiki
- Download the GPX on OpenStreetMap
One of the key points I was trying to make, was indicating that citizens are actually interested in accessing government data such as this, and that agencies should take a more proactive approach to releasing data for the world. After all, data is global these days – put it on the Internet and anyway can access it.
[...] conclusions, and I’ve got one that I would like to add based on recent experience with the State Highway trackpoint data I sourced in NZ and uploaded to [...]
Gav’s Blog › Great post on freeing Govt data
1 Jul 08 at 23:06