[Talk-GB] Secondary, tertiary and unclassified

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On 4 November 2015 at 10:25, Mark Goodge <mark at good-stuff.co.uk> wrote:
> Unfortunately, the NSG is not Open Data, so it isn't available to OSM by
> default. The nearest we can do is attempt to visually classify by
> observation. That's one of the weaknesses of a crowd-sourced approach., If
> that matters to you, you might want to get involved in the campaign to get
> the NSG released as Open Data.

I fear the NSG will probably never be open data, as it's based on OS
base maps, and replicates a large quantity of key OS data (i,e. the
road network). However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the
classification information is inaccessible to OSM. Under the Highways
Act, each highway authority (usually a County Council or Unitary
Authority) is required to maintain a "list of highways maintainable at
public expense" commonly known as the "List of Streets", and make it
available for public inspection. Any rights in this information are
likely to rest solely with the highway authority, so they should be
able to give permission to use it under e.g. the Open Government
Licence, which would then allow its use in OSM.

I have some notes about requesting and getting permission to use these
(and some other related) documents, which people may find useful:
http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/prow/council-docs.htmlt

-- 
Robert Whittaker