[OSM-talk] Corine Land Cover becomes a potential OSM data source...

[Pieren]

at least in France.

The Corine Land Cover (CLC) is refering to a european programme
establishing a computerised inventory on land cover of the 27 EC
member states and other European countries, at an original scale of 1:
100 000, using 44 classes of the 3-level Corine nomenclature.

It is produced by the European Environment Agency (EEA) and its member
countries and is based on the results of IMAGE2000, a satellite
imaging programme undertaken jointly by the Joint Research Centre of
the European Commision and the EEA .

Until now, the terms of use did not allow commercial use unless the
Agency has expressly granted the right to do so. This was stopping any
possibility to use the land use data for OSM.

But, beginning of 2009, french environment agency (IFEN) released the
new version of the dataset of year 2006, called CLC2006 with a newer
version of the terms of use which explicitely allow commercial use.
After some discussions with the french authorities responsible for the
programme in France, it has been clearly stated that the CLC2006 data
for France can be imported into OSM.

During this discussion, it appeared that the same way of opening the
data access has been mentionned at the EEA committee. The ad hoc
committee in Q1/2009 suggested the following proposal for the new
terms of use:

Use rights :
EEA is promoting the widest possible use of all data produced during
the project.
All core land cover data (national and European CLC 2000-2006 changes,
national and European CLC2006 and related metadata, high resolution
built-up areas, including degree of soil sealing, 2006 and high
resolution forest areas, 2006) will be made available free of charge
via the web, for non-commercial as well as commercial uses.

But until it is released at EEA level, only specific national
programmes who officially adopted new terms of use compatible with the
OSM licence could take this data as a potential source.

For France, we are now looking how we will be able to import some of
44 classes. We also created a wiki page trying to translate the CLC
nomenclature to OSM tags:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Corine_Land_Cover

I would like to see your comments about this translation table but
also more in general, about this data source. It is possible that some
other states already used CLC data for OSM, in which case, we would
appreciate if they could share their experience.

regards,
Pieren

EEA web site for CLC2006: http://etc-lusi.eionet.europa.eu/CLC2006/