[Talk-us] Baltimore County GIS Data is now public domain

[Elliott Plack]

TO:
[talk-us]
[imports-us]

FROM:
Elliott Plack
[elliott.plack at gmail.com]
[eplack at baltimorecountymd.gov]

27 Sep 2013

Greetings OpenStreetMappers,

I am very excited to announce that my organization, Baltimore County
Government Office of Information
Technology<http://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/Agencies/infotech/GIS/index.html>
is
releasing our GIS data to the public in a free and nonrestrictive way! We
maintain a vast array of GIS data used for land management, emergency
management, and public works programs. Baltimore County covers nearly 700
square miles and has about 800,000 denizens. Today that data is available
to download (and perhaps integrate into OSM).

http://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/Agencies/infotech/GIS/index.html

I have also put some of our data into some repositories on GitHub, which
you can also see right now <https://github.com/baltimorecounty>. In
particular to OSM interests, I want to point out the AddressPoints
repo<https://github.com/baltimorecounty/address-points>,
just a snippet of the dataset, which is very accurate as it used by our 911
center. We have several full time staff that maintain that data daily. That
data is also available in full from the FTP source above.

I would like to get the conversation started about how some of this data
might be worth *importing *to OSM. There is very little mapping activity in
the rural areas of the county, and while many *buildings *have been
added, *address
*coverage is low. There are many other possibilities here, like converting
centerlines to an imagery layer for improving existing roads, and plat
boundaries for tagging landuse areas in OSM.

We also have hard drives and intranet folders full of *orthoimagery *that
is available upon request. Some dates back to the 1930s.

Regarding licenses and the legal aspects of the data. Baltimore County
asserts that the data is to be released into the public domain. They make
no claims for any kind of license or attribution, but there is a standard
accuracy disclaimer. I have been pushing for a specific license declaration
like ODbL but so far there hasn't been any movement there. If anyone wants
to help with that effort, let me know.

Finally, I want to thank Josh Doe and Ian Dees for getting the Maryland
State Orthoimagery map service proxied by osm.us so that folks may use it
in their JOSM sessions!
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/Local_Chapters/United_States/Servers/Imagery
This
is excellent data from *2011, leaf-off, 6 inch orthophotography*. Great for
mapping!

I welcome comments and feedback.

Cheers,

-- 
Elliott Plack
http://about.me/elliottp
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