California

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California, United States, North America
Wikidata

latitude: 37.05, longitude: -119.63
Browse map of California 37°03′00.00″ N, 119°37′48.00″ W
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California
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California is a state in United States, North America at latitude 37°03′00.00″ North, longitude 119°37′48.00″ West.

Getting started

Consult our guide to mapping in California, which complements the global tagging reference. If you are mapping based on street-level imagery, the California MUTCD reference pages make it easy to translate what you see into detailed tags.

Community

Get in touch with other California mappers:

The San Francisco Bay Area also has a local mailing list and meetups you can join.

Worklists

The following pages keep track of our progress in mapping certain kinds of features that are mapped as relations:

We are also tracking a number of imports of open data. As of January 2022, there is an ongoing discussion of moving the state to an importance-based trunk highway classification scheme.

Without an "import everything" attitude, since 2019 the California Protected Areas Database has had select polygons from it curated into OSM, frequently to clarify "park boundaries" or other boundary=protected_areas. See California/Using_CPAD_data for suggestions on how OSM might best use these data. The data's publisher, GreenInfo, asks (but does not require) that OSM gives source attribution as these ODbL-compliant data enter OSM.

Publicly Available Data

Due to the County of Santa Clara v. California First Amendment Coalition court decision, all public records in California are public domain and not legally copyrightable.This includes records produced by any agent of the California government, such as counties, cities, districts, regions, and any other public offices or bodies established by law (with some notable exceptions). Thus, you can use public GIS data you find on official county or city websites or through public records requests (as long as they are cities or counties in California, as other states may have different laws) as a source for OSM data. All federally produced data are public domain as well, unless they are classified.

Data Sources

Counties

There are 58 counties in California. This list is not exhaustive. Please use template at Creating city pages to create new pages.

Areas

The San Francisco Bay Area is sometimes known as 9-county, sometimes as 11-county, when the Monterey Bay Area is included, San Benito County is the often-omitted 12th.

Tagging

History

The California Office of Historic Preservation is a division of the California State Parks which manages the identification, registration, preservation, and management of historic sites within the state. The OHP recognizes two types of sites within their Register of Historic Resources:

California Historic Landmarks

Sites which are recognized as having special historic significance at the state level. The criteria include being a first, last, or unique site in a large geographic region, being associated with an influential historic individual or group, or being an outstanding example of a period or architectural style.

Historic Landmarks may also be listed on the National Register of Historic Places - in this case, use the heritage tags corresponding to the national level and include the CHL plaque number.

California Points of Historic Interest

Sites which are recognized as having historic significance at the local (county or city) level. If a site is designated as a Historic Landmark, it loses its Point of Historic Interest status.