Re: GC8D6W8 - Issue and question

Regarding GC8D6W8,

https://project-gc.com/Challenges/GC8D6W8/44866

The reviewer has an issue that this challenge uses "districts", which, as far as I know, is the local equivalent to "counties".

My question is, do we have any mapped polygons for Alberta, Canada other than these districts? Does "county" data exist here? If you could check the database and let me know that would be very helpful for me to determine the next step.

Thanks!

All we have are these 3 levels: Canada / Alberta / Calgary and Canmore. Calgary and Canmore appears to be divisions and are probably what's labeled as "local equivalents" as per rule 10 of the challenge cache guidelines:

Source of Criteria: Challenge cache criteria may be based upon these geographic areas: countries, states/provinces, counties (or their local equivalent).

I don't know enough of Canada to be able to comment on what level those divisions are.

OK a little digging over lunch led me to the following (I have lived here my whole life and did not know this was how it was divided):

We do have what we call "Municipal Districts" which are the local equivalent of a county. Several municipal districts make up one Division. Several Divisions make up the Province of Alberta. Several provinces make up the country of Canada.

In other words, in terms of size:
Municipal District < Division < Province < Country

So it would appear that the Divisions that ProjectGC has for the province of Alberta are not the true "counties" - they are one step larger. I think this challenge should still work since Municipal Districts / "counties" are smaller than Divisions (ie you can say MD X, Y and Z make up Division A).

But... this brings up a new question: if we have the geo-data for Municipal Districts (which I think I can find), can we add that into ProjectGC so the province of Alberta has proper "counties"?

Only those 3 levels are available on Project-GC. But using Divisions would make the challenge easier for people to qualify since it's a larger area, so you should have less issues with reviewers. And no, you won't be able to add MD's since that would be the fourth level and not part of the three levels mentioned above.

Yes I agree - the challenge should go through with the reviewers. We will see.

Instead of adding a 4th level, could we replace the Divisions currently on the 3rd level (typically reserved for counties) with data for Alberta's Municipal Districts, which are actually our county equivalent?

One of the Divisions in the province of Alberta is 192,000 km^2, which is nearly as large as the entire United Kingdom... It really should have that 3rd layer divided into smaller chunks of area.

I believe the levels chosen are linked to some of the Openstreetmap levels (if memory serves there's about 7 layers there). However, I'm not involved in that selection process at all. I would suggest you hit the the "support" button on the Project-GC site and enquire there. That's if nobody else speaks up on this thread.

For Canada Projectgc is using the census data not the openstreetmap data.

The polygons are provided by https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/geo/bound-limit/bound-limit-2011-eng.cfm

Interesting, looks like depending on the province in Canada, census divisions either do or do not correspond to that province's county equivalent. In Alberta, the census divisions are not the proper provincial county equivalent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_geographic_units_of_Canada#Census_divisions
As I mentioned above, the wikipedia page says the census divisions consist of groups of municipalities.

I ended up finding a Government Shapefile of Alberta's Municipalities (counties) from here:
https://open.alberta.ca/opendata/property-municipal-boundaries#summary

which redirects for a download here:
https://www.altalis.com/map;id=113

So looks like some good data is available if we wanted to correct the census divisions to the actual province defined counties.

Challenge cache is published and request moved to ARCHIVE Checker requests (completed).