Open Maps?

Chilltowner asks: "I'm trying to get local (US) maps together for a community project. I want to able to modify and annotate the maps and provide them free to the public, creating a derivative open work. They also need to be accurate down to the street level and no more than 10 years out of date. I've been searching around for maps available in the public domain or under open licenses, like the Creative Commons licenses allowing derivative works. I've looked at the National Atlas, but the maps, though interesting, aren't detailed enough with street information. The topographical and aerial image maps available through that site are from Terraserver, which are copyrighted to Microsoft. Plus, I really just need simple vector road maps, not USGS rasters. I tried looking at the Census Bureau's TIGER line data, but I can't make heads or tails of it. Are there maps available through other agencies (national or international)? Are there Free/Open-Source Software projects that are making use of public data to build street-level maps for free (as in speech) use?"

Re:Making maps is not an esoteric science

[Anonymous Coward]

He's basically asking if someone else has already done this. Mapping is a lot of work and there would not be much of a point in duplicating the effort.

Re:Making maps is not an esoteric science

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone's already written Unix, but it doesn't stop people from trying to reinvent it every day.

Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

copyrights are for a long fucking time in the USA.
Find one of those "old" maps. They're always engineering the roads. You'll find things are quite different now than then. They even change the names of the roads. Your Local "MLK drive" was called something different 30 years ago.

TerraServer-USA is not copyright!

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeeze, it's amazing the level of stupidity seen in the average Slashdot article nowadays.

TerraServer-USA data is not copyright by Microsoft or anyone else, as is very clearly stated on their FAQ [microsoft.com] page:

Are there any restrictions on what I can do with the images that I download?

The images from the U.S. Geological Survey, and are freely available for you to download, use and re-distribute. The TerraServer team and the USGS appreciate credit for their work on this project by displaying the message "Image courtesy of the USGS".

Jeeze. 1/2 second of research and we wouldn't have to deal with stupid crap.

Watch out who you ask for information ...

[auburnate]

In this present day and age, you may have officials from HLS or FBI come knocking wondering what on earth you need maps for ...

Re:Maps and accessories baby...

[SmurfButcher Bob]

That'd only give you positional accuracy, which is almost useless. What's needed is attribution for a given segment - what's the address block of the left side? The right? Are the addresses uniformly distributed? Any "even" numbered houses on the "odd" side of the street or vice-versa?

Then there's the type of street, directionality, names and aliases, speed limits, on-street parking, sidewalks left and right, bike-routes left and right, congestion levels (by time of day), max axle weight capability, max height clearance, lane counts (left and right), and other attribution (car-pools only, etc) that'd be relevent.

Positional accuracy of the segments is pretty much worthless by itself. Cool to look at in real time, but only useful in real time... which is stupid ("Look, ma! The map say's we're right HERE! And look, we ARE!")

Good attribution with crap positional accuracy is 1000000 times more useful than perfect position without such attributes, because it enables you to use the map BEFORE you go somewhere.

To put it shortly: Why?

[Kjella]

A map that is a mushpot of variously updated information is going to be very confusing. Plus, you have all the trolling problems of Wikipedia without really the checks. Historical things don't change. If someone changes something I know for a fact, there's no problem correcting it. But did someone build a new road? Rename one? For each time, I'd have to check that *my* information isn't outdated before I revert it.

For once I think this is something better left to a government office that can put the maps in the public domain. Even metadata will have big trouble as "open data". Try tracking all the fly-by-night establishments in e.g. the restaurant or nightclub industry... good luck.

Kjella

I'm not so sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

At least that's what the law was the last time I checked: you can't copyright a fact (or a made up fact for that matter)

Photographs would seem to be "facts" just like maps, perhaps even moreseo. Yet you -can- copyright a photograph.

And fiction novels are made up facts, yet you -can- copyright a novel.

No, he is not re-inventing the wheel

[FeatureBug]

He wants maps which are under a Creative-Commons type of copyright licence [creativecommons.org] because he wants to be able to publish derivative works such as annotated or modified versions of the original map . The copyright licences on most existing maps, as used by map24.com, are not compatible with Creative-Commons licences, which prevents him from using them.

Re:No need to re-invent the wheel

[dasmegabyte]

Here, here. But I think it's obvious this guy was more interested in the anti-commercial aspects of his project than in the technical ones...otherwise he'd have realized that raster maps -- which are just scanned images with coordinates added to the corners -- are far more readily available than vector maps, which are usually created BY HAND from raster maps. Which is what he's probably going to have to do if he doesn't just buy one outright: sit down with a copy of ArcInfo ($1500) and go line by line over a high def map, then cross reference the street info on another layer. A chore, for sure, but you only have to do it once. There are quite a few independent GIS consultants who will do the job for you for a fraction of the cost of said program...expect to pay $800 or so for the street map made from scratch.

Any way you look at it, it will be cheaper to buy the info if you want vectors AND street info. Get the town board behind you on this project! Get citizen support, the cost will be like $1 per resident I'm sure, well worth it. With these two in hand, you can get really good maps made up...and like I mentioned, you only need them made once (though you should update it once every six months or so along with new development).

Of course, you could get REALLY lucky, and discover somebody's already made really detailed digital maps of your area. The state and/or county probably have quite a bit, as might the USGS. Data from the USGS is free (though sometimes you have to pay for the bandwidth or media to get it), and many states have programs that provide free data IF AND ONLY IF you promise to give them any digitized maps you product (sound familiar? it's GPL for maps!). Here's the list for my county [state.ny.us]...you can also search that site for detailed (1 meter) orthoimagery that puts Terraserver to shame and 1:24 000 contour maps.

Re:Digital Map Databases

[MrChuck]

To develop Exchange, Microsoft has spent millions of dollars, countless meeting hours and hundreds of developers work on it.

To develop Word, Microsoft has ... well the same (plus people to take ALL the F'ing suggestions for features and make sure everything gets added).

Sendmail took one guy, mainly, a semester or so and then a core of MAYBE 20 people to develop it.

Postfix was, in large part, a 1 person project.

Except for what Linus took from Minix (kidding!), a kernel was developed, without networking code, by one guy.

We can mutter about UIs and Gnome/KDE (hell, X11).

If anything can fall under the Million Monkey's Factor of Open Source, maps can.

I'm at an office where it takes dozens and dozens of people hours and meetings to add a line to a sendmail access file. But sometimes, I just do it in 12 seconds and get forgiveness later.