New Zealand data import projects
New Zealand has relatively open government, and is willing to release data under very permissive licences. This is a policy to be applauded; they are ahead of a lot of other governments in this respect. However, caution should be exercised when requesting data - we, as maintainers of OSM are outside the government, and are sometimes unaware of the primary work these departments carry out, and the effort necessary to prepare data for OSM.
Every effort should be made to assist them as much as possible, by discussing the request first amongst the community, and making the request in a way which will minimise disruption to them. Any request reflects upon the entire OSM community, currently (2010-05) 250,000+ members, and we have a responsibility to appear credible.
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LINZ data
LINZ has a range of data, developed with public funding, including details of roads and land titles. The data is provided under Crown Copyright and the license is compatible with the OSM license.
See the LINZ page for more information, and the archives of the nz open gis google group (see above).
- Please contact the NZ OpenGIS mailing list before undertaking any bulk uploads of this data yourself.
Zenbu data
Zenbu is a user-generated business-listings website, with data released under the Creative Commons by Attribution license, which is compatible with that of OSM.
Main article: Zenbu
LENZ/LCDB
I just spotted this today on http://nzoss.org.nz/news/2009/new-zealand-geographical-data-released-under-creative-commons (posted 2 July 2009)
- Two major environmental databases are set to become more accessible and easier to use following the re-release of these digital maps by the Ministry for the Environment.
- The Land Cover Database and the Land Environments New Zealand classification layers, widely used by agencies in environmental and resource management planning, will now be issued online with a Creative Commons Attribution licence.
- ...
The Level 4 data appears to be around 25m resolution. The data is hosted on koordinates. I'm not sure if this would be of use to OSM?
DOC data
Some DOC data has been released under the Creative Commons by Attribution Licence, which is compatible with that of OSM.
Main article: DOC
Official Information Act
It has been suggested on the NZOpenGIS list, that any information obtained under this act is free of copyright, instead being Public Domain. This would allow any information obtained this way to be used in OSM. Official Information Act details
data sources which may fall under the OIA
ARC - lots of very high quality, detailed maps including legal boundaries of all residences, regional parks and aerial photography
DOC
MAF
Transit
observations of the OIA and LGOIMA
- [http: edcorkery.com/2008/04/27/council-staff-attitudes-towards-geodata-requests/ Council staff attitudes towards geodata requests] (dead url)
to do
verify this claim
find out what data it applies to
find out the process to request this data
Christchurch City Council
In the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake, Chch council released data pertaining to damaged roads and bridges, under a CC-BY license, which is compatible with the CC-BY-SA license of OSM.
The data is available from koordinates.com, and is being imported (2011-02) by mappers who communicate via NZ Open GIS group - https://groups.google.com/group/nzopengis if you would like to help
US government data
All data released by the US government is public domain, so can be included in osm. some of it is relevant to nz
NOAA.gov New Zealand weather stations
http://nzopengis.googlegroups.com/web/mms-nz.osm.bz2
GPS monitoring stations data from NASA
http://igscb.jpl.nasa.gov/network/netindex.html
CIA World Data Bank data
WikiProject Import WDB contains information about the WDB data, which is public domain, and therefore compatible with OSM. The data should be investigated to ascertain whether there is anything useful in it for New Zealand.
To do
find out what data is contained in the data set
find out whether there is better data already uploaded for New Zealand
use the script detailed on the WDB wiki page to import anything useful
vmap0 data
vmap0 is a data set containing information on all the world's roads, but it is generally low quality. It is in the public domain, and is thus compatible with OSM. There is a discussion currently (2008-01-08) under way on the osm talk list, concerning upload of vmap0 data to osm, by a user from the FlightGear project. For the moment, I have suggested that no data is uploaded to new zealand, at least until the status of the linz data (which is probably better quality) is resolved Myfanwy 02:52, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
- Target scale for DCW/VMap0 data is 1:1 Million, Target scale for LINZ topo data is 1:50,000.
