[Talk-us] MassGIS building conversion

[Alex Barth]

+1 for importing this. I'm curious for a battle plan of whoever leads this effort, this will be a lot of work.

Re: license, I've heard personally from MassGIS director Christian Jacqz that all of Mass' GIS data is public domain based on the state's open policy on public records. I think this is fantastic, a link to a law or similar would still be useful.

Is there address data that could be conflated with these buildings?

On Dec 9, 2012, at 3:51 PM, Jason Remillard <remillard.jason at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> But, in general, I don't think the MassGIS ID's should be included since they are just the center of mass of the buildings, and there is no indication that they will be preserving them as they update the data set.

This is interesting that the id (STRUCT_ID?) is to be dropped. If MassGIS does not track an ID on buildings, how do they properly use this data? Do they use an id that is not in the current data set? Generally speaking preserving such an id would be useful IMO for enabling clear references to outside datasets. E. g. 


> Even if they did preserve them, it is not really useful to OSM because we already have a ton of hand drawn buildings in the state that will need to get managed in any future updates. So, right now, the only tag in the data is building=yes. 
> 
> Thanks
> Jason.
> 
> 
> On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 2:05 PM, the Old Topo Depot <oldtopos at novacell.com> wrote:
> Hi Jason,
> 
> If the MassGIS building/address objects have MassGIS IDs are you planning to preserve them in the OSM DB ?
> 
> Best,
> 
> On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Jason Remillard <remillard.jason at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Serge,
> 
> I don't see a license related to this data, only a copyright notice on
> the page. Is there a separate license somewhere that says this data is
> usable?
> 
> Like the federal goverment, maps are considered part of the public record in Mass, and therefor are in the public domain (no copyright). No license is needed for the data. OSM has already confirmed this directly with the MassGIS people.
> 
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MassGIS
> 
>  
> 
> > Since it is likely that next year we will be importing this data into OSM to
> > support addresses, I figured it would be useful to convert the files to OSM
> > format and share them.
> 
> What is the script you're plannng to use for conversion? What is your
> mapping scheme? What is your plan regarding conflation with existing
> data? What is your plan regarding updates?
> 
> - I will put up my ugly little script shortly. 
> - schema, building = yes
> - conflation, don't import a building that overlaps with an existing building in OSM.
> 
> I was thinking that this was a precursory step for the import. I don't have the time right now to lead an import myself. Regardless of who actually does it, I think getting a lot of eyes on the data is the best starting point for whatever happens next. 
> 
> Thanks
> Jason.
>  
> 
> - Serge
> 
> 
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> 
> -- 
> John Novak
> 585-OLD-TOPOS (585-653-8676)
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Alex Barth
http://twitter.com/lxbarth
tel (+1) 202 250 3633