On Sun, Mar 3, 2019 at 11:58 AM Richard Welty <rwe...@averillpark.net> wrote: > i have not reviewed NYS GIS data because there were, in the past > at least, licensing issues. i do not know if those have been resolved > so i'm not pitching a fit about that. it might be ok now. i just don't > know. but from this edit, it appears that NYS GIS contains things that > were wrong in 2007 when we took in the TIGER data.
Assuming that you're talking about http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=932 , that particular data set is OK. The other one that's recently OK (there was an announcement) is the address point data at http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=921. They're both part of a Street and Address Maintenance (SAM) project at NYSGIS. Generally speaking, NYSGIS data are effectively public domain, but some data sets were created by contractors or county governments that licensed the data to the state on restrictive terms. Several of the data sets that presented difficulties - such as NYS Public Lands - have been taken down in recent years. The awkward one is parcel data, where the horrendous Suffolk v Experian case set an awkward precedent. It left undecided some major points because the parties settled after the Second Circuit remanded for further proceedings, but left open at least the possibility that tax maps are copyrightable. It is the only Federal appellate court that has reached such an opinion. Nevertheless, twenty counties http://gis.ny.gov/parcels/ have agreed to let the state re-release their parcel data. Moreover, the state has compiled a database (from county records) of the lands that it owns at http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=1300 - and is claiming that it has the unquestioned right to release the plats of its own holdings and daring the counties to sue. That data set replaces the no-longer-released "NYS Public Lands" dataset, which was copyrighted by the contractor that produced it. (Alas, it no longer includes county and municipal facilities.) Incidentally, a year or two ago all NYS parks, historic sites, and recreation area were compared against that data set and many were updated accordingly - including contacting the original mappers in case of conflict. In all cases, the original mappers responded that their data were traced approximately from aerials and welcomed the updates. I didn't call this job an 'import' since the lines eventually drawn were gleaned from a variety of sources and not drawn directly from the data set. An extreme example is https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6440291 (note in particular the 'note' tag there). Notes like this are an important trail to build a case that data were not directly copied, and hence copyright was not infringed. A copyright holder has no monopoly over facts, merely the expression, selection, structure, sequence and organization - and notes like these provide evidence that our criteria for selection and organization are different from those of our data sources. You're right that the SAM data has obsolete data, errors, and streets that were platted but never built. In some cases, I think they stay in the database because the state or a municipality still own the rights-of-way. A few weeks (months?) ago, there was an announcement of a MapRoulette project to add streets from http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=932 that were not in OSM. I suspect that's where your offending driveway came from. I tried a few in Schenectady and Saratoga Counties, but wound up passing on most as "too hard" because they were things like a subdivision platted in a wood, where the most recent NYS Orthos Online were three years old, so it could be new construction needing a field survey. I don't think I wound up adding anything from the couple of dozen things that I tried - where I did have local knowledge, OSM was right and NYSGIS was wrong. Which was unsurprising, since I'd already mapped my local knowledge. I'd classify http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=932 as "best available third-party data" for NYS streets - it's not nearly as hallucinatory as TIGER. But it's still surely imperfect. I'll copy-n-paste from it if I have corroborating evidence that it's right, and I'd investigate significant discrepancies between it and OSM, but I'd not import anything from it blindly. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
