Comment by pauletienney

11 hours ago

As an illustration of it: I have been working for two years on a new national project for the french state. Le Référentiel National des Bâtiments (for National Buildings Registry) which aim at creating and distributing a id key to every building in the country.

The goal is to make databases about buildings much more interoperable.

One key aspect is to have a precise list of all buildings includings recent constructions and demolition. It gets interesting because we recognize nobody in the country has the perfect list of buildings so we radically open the data to let governement agencies, cities, companies, citizens write directly in the registry. Think OSM or Wikipédia but for an official dataset.

This approach is very experimental for the french state and we are encouraged to test it and disseminate our learnings in other state branches.

8 comments

pauletienney

Reply
wvh  8 hours ago

That's a lovely idea. I have been working for large open data projects and secretive private data collections and they both fail in their own ways. Maybe the open-source gathering with a proper authority to lock down and shepherd data in case of dispute or vandalism is the golden middle way. Sort of like the BDFL concept: open for all, ultimately vetoed by a benevolent entity.

jraph  10 hours ago

Nice!

Since OSM is, among other things, a list of building, will there be exchanges between the two projects? Are the licenses of the two projects compatible?

  • pauletienney  10 hours ago

    Well, we have some connections with the community and we are discussing how to incorporate our buildings IDs in OSM. The other way around (OSM to national registry) seems more complicated for license reasons.

    Last summer we tested the open approch by doing a "RNB Summer game". Basically, anyone could come on the map and send some error reporting, we had a score per player, per territory and a shared global score. The OSM community absolutely rolled ont the game :)