[Imports] Boundary of Tonga

Michael Krämer ohrosm at googlemail.com
Wed May 16 06:32:16 UTC 2012


Hi,

2012/5/16 Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at earthlink.net>

> Tracing coastlines that vary over time and are of unverified positional
> accuracy, and then stretching those out to cover the supposed territorial
> limits (and knowing the correct methods and exceptions) seems like the
> wrong answer here. It really seems these should come from an import of the
> officially defined and negotiated international boundaries, no? There were
> some issues with claimed (perhaps invalidly) copyrights over some of the UN
> data, but one of those UN datasets should be available by now. Or perhaps a
> US government has a copyright-free dataset for us?
>

Fully agreed. Tracing coastlines is definetly not the ideal situation -
although perhaps the best we can get for the time being. The resulting
error is probably in the same range as we see with imported borders ie.
from WDB as those are sometimes pretty generalized.

In the corresponding act I linked to in my previous post, Tonga refers to
British Admirality maps as the reference for the coastline to define the
baseline. So I doubt that there's a legal way from those maps into OSM...

There is a database of maritime boundaries [1] but I think the license is
not compatible with OSM. But perhaps it might be worth the effort to ask
them directly.

Michael

[1] http://www.vliz.be/vmdcdata/marbound/
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