[OSM-talk] Abandoned Rails

Paul Johnson baloo at ursamundi.org
Wed Sep 2 13:25:52 UTC 2015


On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 7:23 AM, <phil at trigpoint.me.uk> wrote:

> We can map barriers and visible dividing marks, but land ownership has
> massive privacy and data protection issues.


Depends on the region.  I've even heard it from county officials
(incorrectly!) citing this regarding trying to get address centroids here
(even though I'm not interested in who owns the land or even necessarily
what the property lines are, just where one can expect to find an address
along a street, and only requested the centroids; see the OKGIS archive
from August for how that went).  But in most (all?) of the US, land
ownership (and vehicle ownership, for that matter) records are open and
subject to public inspection, and why land transfers are typically
published conspicuously in the regional news perodical of record.  Which is
why landowners get phone calls by name from roofing contractors after
storms have gone through, and why you'll get junkmail from lawyers and body
shops if your plate number (or sometimes even a similar one if someone
fudged it, as I discovered when someone in Ohio who has the same plate
number as me was apparently involved in a bad wreck) was reported in an
accident.
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