A few years ago, Esri got their hands on amazing, high-res imagery of a few urban areas in the province of New Brunswick, Canada. I found this out through the Canadian tasking manager when I was a newbie looking for ways to contribute. I can only say that I stumbled upon a gold mine. Way back in 2017, I contributed to the cities of Edmundston and Moncton. When I came back this year, there was not much work left to be done in those areas and I moved on to a new project: the towns of Bathurst and Beresford. I started back in May when I was looking for some distraction during the lockdown and I picked it back up at the start of September because I was looking for some distraction from college work. I decided it would be nice to share what I’ve been up to there with the community so here it goes!

The goal

The aim of the Tasking Manager project was to just map all the buildings. Because, well, there were none at all. As I started working though, I noticed there was much more that needed to be done than just adding some buildings. Most of these areas have never been properly mapped.

CanVec

Large parts of the Canadian map have been imported from CanVec, a vector map provided by the Canadian Natural Resources organization. In the area of Beresford, the import happened back in 2012. That’s already eight years ago. And the quality of the data wasn’t particularly great. Roads are inaccurate, forests cover half the urban areas, bridges aren’t actually placed over the water, you name it.

Mapping the town

Since the imagery that Esri offers is so good, I decided I’d do more than simply add the buildings. I have been mapping as much of this town as I possibly could. That includes the buildings of course, but also the landuses, the roads, paths, forest tracks, beaches, and even power lines. I’m taking it in small steps, usually two or three changesets of about 1500 edits per day.

The work

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While I was looking through the area I’m busy mapping, I noticed all kinds of weird errors in the French land registry. Now, we all know French bureaucracy is hell, but the folks who do the land registry are sometimes weird. Here are some examples:

This looks.. different…

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Hi everyone! This is my first user diary here!

Recently I’ve began to map the area around the towns Le Thillot, Fresse-sur-Moselle, Saint-Maurice-sur-Moselle and Bussang. I’ve lived in this area for a few years and still visit multiple times a year. When I pulled up the street map I saw a lot of missing features, badly-maintained maps and inconsistencies.

For example, importing the land register (Cadastre 2014) has given a lot of strange shapes (e.g. cutoffs in buildings when an area line cuts through it or non-orthogonal shapes). Although satellite imagery is often misaligned/warped in this hilly landscape, some buildings are obviously in the wrong place, too small, rotated, etc. It’s hard to fix these without good quality aerial imagery, but in some cases it’s easy to see what’s wrong. Not everything will be able to get fixed though.

Misaligned buildings in Le Thillot:

Driveways:

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